


believe implicitly in the invisible world

by iamnotacreative



Category: Barry (TV 2018), IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Amnesia, Explicit Language, Gen, Mostly Canon Compliant, amnesia x3, as canon compliant as a crossover can be, lots and lots of explicit language, post-s2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:21:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 42,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26756452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iamnotacreative/pseuds/iamnotacreative
Summary: Barry Berkman doesn't know who the fuck Richie Tozier is. Or Mike Hanlon from Maine, for that matter. But going on a rampage at the monastery was a dangerous, impulsive move, and he has to get the fuck out of dodge. So why not to some town in bumfuck Maine, where a bunch of people think he's their childhood friend for some reason? It's not like he has any other allies to lie low with. How bad can it be.
Comments: 54
Kudos: 70





	1. Prologue

When I get angry, I don’t like who I become.

When I get angry, I don’t like who I become.

When I get angry, I don’t like who I become.

Barry sees Mayrbek’s open, glazed over eyes unfocused on the ceiling, in his head. The first person to ever sincerely thank him for teaching him how to fight and shoot a gun. A deal he didn’t want to make in the first place, but got him out of his debt with Noho Hank and the Chechens.

Not that that mattered any more. 

Not that any of it mattered anymore. 

Barry hit both of his palms onto his head once, twice, three times, but it doesn’t get Mayrbek’s face out of it. He hits his head once more as he paces around his room in Nick and Jermaine’s apartment, but the visual doesn’t get better. Instead he sees a monastery full of unsuspecting people he slaughtered, and none of them Fuches. He sees Janice’s face the moment after he shot her twice in the chest. He shakes out his hands like the stress is radiating from there. He shakes out the pins and needles and he sees Mr. Cousineau, blank faced, staring at the body of Janice Moss in the trunk. He sees Fuches running away from the car and from Mr Cousineau. He sees Fuches selling him out to Loach. He sees Fuches threatening to kill everyone he knows. He sees Fuches, and he screams. 

There's a new hole in the wall. He doesn’t remember making it but he feels the throbbing in his fist to know how it got there. A fist sized hole right underneath the three bullet sized holes from when Noho Hank tried to kill him. Again. 

He drops to the floor and puts his head in his hands, leaning against the side of his bed. If Nick and Jermaine are home, they don’t come to check on his scream. He breathes. Heavy, then softer, then softer. There’s a ringing in the back of his head, and a buzzing in his legs and he can’t focus on either. He doesn’t even know when they started. 

Eventually the buzzing stops and his heart rate goes down. He takes that as a good sign. But then the buzzing starts in his leg again, a pulse that doesn’t match the tune of his body.

Oh. His phone is ringing. 

Barry pulls the phone out of his pocket and doesn’t recognize the number. It’s not something unfamiliar in his line of work, so he answers it anyway, pretty sure who the fuck it is. 

“Fuches if this is you I’m coming for you. I will fucking end you mark my words it is over for you.”

“Um… Richie?”

The voice is one he doesn’t recognize, but as soon as he hears it and the name a stabbing pain shoots through the back of his head. 

“Who? Who is this? How did you get this number?”

“This is Mike.” There’s a pause. “Mike Hanlon? From Derry?”

Barry’s brain reels. Did he do a job for someone named Mike? He couldn’t remember every hit he’d been hired for, that’s what Fuches was there for. Had he ever been to Derry? Wait, where the fuck is Derry?

“Where the fuck is Derry?” he says out loud. 

The guy on the other end hesitates. “Uh, Maine. Derry is a town in Maine.”

“Sorry man, I haven’t been to Maine in years, and it wasn’t in a town called Derry. It was some place called Banger or something.”

“Bangor?” Mike asks, clearly a better expert on the state of Maine. 

“That’s the one.” 

Mike sounds like he’s frowning. “So this isn’t Richie Tozier?”

His headache strikes again. “Sorry man, you got the wrong number. And also, sorry i threatened you, I thought you were someone else.”

“Sure,” Mike says slowly. “I- um. Sorry to bother you.”

“Sure man.” Barry hangs up. He needs some fucking ibuprofen. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from IT by Stephen King. "It occurred to him that kids were better at almost dying, and they were also better at incorporating the inexplicable into their lives. They believed implicitly in the invisible world."
> 
> tumblr @prexenatious


	2. Do you think I'm a bad person, Mr Cousineau? -Barry Berkman, Barry s2e4

Barry looks at his caller ID as he’s on his way to class. NoHo Hank. Shit. He doesn’t want to pick it up but knows he’s going to have to deal with it over the phone now, or he will find him later. He always winds up finding him. 

So he picks up. 

“Hank,” is all he says.

“Barry! Buddy!” Hank’s voice is somehow always so chipper it’s nauseating. Even when Barry just killed all of his allies. “How are youuu?”

“Peachy, Hank. What do you want?”

“Nothing sheesh!” NoHo Hank. Always so casual. “I just wanted to catch up. You know, after you killed all of my friends and family members. And also all of the Burmese monks. And also my Cristobal. You know, no big deal.”

Barry pinches the bridge of his nose as he pauses at the stoplight, really not wanting to have this conversation. “Look, Hank, I’m sorry about that I-”

“Barry! Please, you are my best friend! I can’t believe you would do this for me! I know that I told you that I was losing their respect and they wouldn’t listen to me, but this was a little bit much, no? Also, little bit late.”

I’m sorry, what? Barry clenches the wheel so tightly his knuckles go white until the light turns green. “What? Hank I-”

“Good news too! Batir is here,” Hank keeps going. “You know, person who was going to replace me and send me back to Chechnya? Now, he thinks I killed Esther because bullet I gave you was on her chest. Very nice touch by the way.” NoHo Hank’s voice sounds almost appreciative and it’s confusing the hell out of Barry. 

“Wait, Batir is here?” Barry finally gets a word in. “New leader of the Chechen gang, Batir is here?”

“No Barry, I am leader or Chechens. You know this! Come on, buddy.”

“Okay sure, Hank. What did you tell him?”

“I told him I had Esther and the Burmeses killed. Boom! Problem solved for him!”

Barry’s mind is reeling, and he turns the corner a little too aggressively and has to sort himself back out. “Okay but his friends and family.”

“Dead, yes, but! Respect for me. Good news!”

“Hank, jesus christ, Hank! Did you tell him anything about me?”

“Of course! Barry please, you are best friend of Chechen gang. Of course I tell him about you!”

Barry arrives at the gate of the building, then keeps driving past. There’s a car with tinted windows that isn’t usually there. Barry’s already on edge, he’s not taking the risk. The windows are too tinted to be any casual driver, but he’s pretty sure he saw someone’s silhouette waiting for him to arrive, and he doesn’t understand how Hank can be so fucking happy with him when he killed everyone he knows, allies or not, right in front of him. 

“Fuck!” 

“Barry?” NoHo Hank now seems concerned on the other side of the line. “Buddy, you okay man?”

“I gotta go Hank. Glad you’re so happy about me murdering everyone.” He hangs up so quickly and so aggressively his phone, which was on speaker on the passenger seat, falls to the floor of the car. “Fuck!” he yells again. 

He makes a lap around the block to drive past again and get a closer look at the suspicious car. It does him no better. He’s got to lay low. He’s got to get the fuck out of LA. 

***

He heads back to the hotel room Barry knows Fuches wouldn’t dare still be staying in. He’s right. The room is empty, Do Not Disturb sign still on the door. Not that that stopped him from entering. Barry broke through the door, gun hot just in case Fuches really was that stupid, and saw the room looking like it suffered through an explosion. He rifles through what’s left of the room. No money left behind, no clues to where he went, nothing. The only thing there was a pair of boots that he promptly threw out the window.  
  


When he gets back to his apartment he starts shoving things into the biggest bag he can find (which admittedly isn’t his, but Jermaine owes him so much money who even cares?). He doesn’t have a plan, or anywhere to go, or anyone to lay low with. He just knows he has to leave. With the whole Chechens/Bolivians/Burmese thing, plus Moss’s investigation that’s still going on, PLUS Fuches trying to ruin his life AGAIN?? Fuck LA. But also not fuck LA because it gave him acting. 

He drops down onto his bed for a second, a t-shirt in hand. Fuck. LA gave him the will to live again. LA gave him acting and Sally and Mr Cousineau. But LA also gave him NoHo Hank and the Chechens, Janice Moss, and Fuches fucking him over. LA gave him so much. And he’s gotta get the fuck out. 

Maybe he could go to Atlanta. That’s where all the acting is, right? Or Toronto? Fuck he’s never going to find an acting group like Mr Cousineau’s class. Not that he went out looking for them either, but he’s glad he did. 

His phone buzzes in his pocket, surprising him out of his thoughts. It’s an unknown number with the location from Derry, Maine. Probably that guy again. He picks up anyway, just in case. 

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this not Richie again?”

“Sorry man,” the distraction from his thoughts lets him begin packing again, at a less frantic pace this time. “Not Richie.”

“That’s so interesting,” Barry really doesn’t have the time for this conversation but he lets the guy continue so he doesn’t have to think about his thoughts. “I traced Richie’s timeline back from when I knew him in ‘89, all the way to 2007, when he disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“I don’t know what to tell you man-”

“Mike.”

“Mike,” Barry echoes. He feels a headache start to come on. “I don’t know what to tell you, Mike. I was a Marine up until ‘07.” 

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “Would your name happen to be Barry Berkman?”

Barry stops short of throwing his toothbrush into his bag. The whole guideline of his line of work was supposed to be low profile. No one was supposed to know who he is other than those he introduced himself to. “How did you know that?”

“Barry, there are no records of you up until 2007, when your name was registered for the first time in Cleveland. Coincidentally, the same time and place as my friend Richie Tozier.”

“No record, what do you mean no record? I was in the army.”

“Barry, is there any chance that you would be able to come to Derry? I’ll explain everything just please, meet me here. We need you.”

“I don’t even know you!” Barry yells into the phone. 

“Barry, have you ever wondered why you can’t seem to remember the things most people should, about where they’re from, about who they are? Why you have that scar on your hand? No one else remembered either. Eddie, Ben, Beverly, Bill, Stan.”

“Stan?” There’s a sharp pain in his palm, and he turns his left hand over to reveal a scar he doesn’t remember being there. 

“Come to Derry, Barry. Please.”

Barry hears his heartbeat thrumming in his head. The blood rush is drowning out whatever Mike is saying as he stares at his palm. Where is that scar from? It was from a job, it had to be from a job. Which one? Denver? No that was in the shoulder. Minnesota? No, that was the leg. He’s gotten so many scars over the years he doesn’t remember where each was but this had to be one of those, right?

“Barry?”

Mike’s voice snaps him back to reality, soothing but also making his headache thrum at the same time. Familiar. 

“Will you come to Derry, Barry?”

A million thoughts run through Barry’s head. What was he doing again? He has to lay low, right?

He clenches his hand and opens it again. The scar is still there. 

“Yeah, I’ll come. Where is Derry again?”

“Maine. Can you be here tomorrow?”

“Wait hold on,” Barry shakes his head. “That’s across the country. I’m in LA.”

“Do you think they won’t have any flights out?” Mike sounds genuinely concerned.

“No I-” Barry stutters. What was he considering? He needed to go into hiding right? “I was just hoping I would be able to drive.” 

“Oh…” Mike goes silent. “Do you… Is that a dealbreaker?”

Barry blinks. “No, I guess not. I’ll see what’s available.”

Mike releases a deep sigh that Barry finds a little off-putting and concerning. “Thank you Barry. I’ll text you the details of the town inn and where we’ll meet.”

“Um, okay,” Barry almost whispers, starting to regret his decision already. “I guess I’ll see you in Maine?”

“Yes! See you soon!” Mike hangs up and Barry is left alone again. He stares at his phone for a minute, trying to figure out what in the hell just happened. Looking around his bare bones room with holes in the wall, it’s a mess. In his distraction on the phone most of the clothes he tossed at his bag didn’t actually make it in. He picks them back up absentmindedly until one pair of pants reveals Mr Cousineau’s book, on the floor next to his nightstand. A new wave of emotions rolls through his body without his consent. He sits on the floor with the book in his hands, staring at Mr Cousineau’s face, unable to actually feel any of the emotions running through him. 

Suddenly, an overwhelming wave of nausea vaults him off the floor and to his window. Shoving the already open window as wide as it can go, he sticks his head out and vomits onto the sidewalk below. Luckily it doesn’t hit anyone, but he hears someone down the block yelling ‘what the fuck?!’ He doesn’t care enough. He lets his head hang out of the window, allowing the cool wind to soothe his overheating scalp and mind. 

A text from Mike snaps him out of it, saying thank you again, detailing which airport to fly into and what he should do once he gets off the plane. Barry reads it, then places the book gently in his bag. Then he pushes his mattress slightly off the bed frame. He doesn’t know what the hell he’s walking into. He might need some backup. 

***

He’s at his boarding gate for a red eye flight debating his entire life when Sally calls him, absentmindedly rubbing the scar on his palm.

“Hey Sally-”

“Barry? You weren’t in class today and I really needed to talk to you. Not that it was much of a class since, you know, Mr Cousineau, but we all met up just in case and I thought you would be there. I mean I wanted to talk to you and I guess I kind of expected to see you at some point today but you didn’t answer my texts about coming over. And I’m sorry if you were thrown off by my performance the other night, I don’t know what happened.”

A lady walks past him and her bag smacks into his leg. He shoots a glare at her. 

“I panicked, y’know? You just walked off stage and then people just started applauding and then i lost track of you but god, fuck Barry people took my story seriously. I didn’t want to become the spokesperson for women in abused relationships that never stood up for themselves-”

He notices his shoe is untied and leans down to tie it, balancing his phone on his shoulder. 

“-but now I’ve somehow become the girl who stood up to her abuser and that’s not me! I did exactly what I didn’t want to do except now for something that I didn’t even do! I haven’t stood up to anyone in my entire life and now I feel shitty about that too. Fuck Barry! Can you come over?”

Barry leans back up in his seat and his mind is blank. Uhhhhh… “I actually can’t, I-” 

He’s interrupted by the desk attendant announcing the beginning of passenger boarding.

“Are you at the airport? You’re leaving? Nick said your room was a mess, where are you where are you going?”

Shit. “I’m actually on my way to… Cleveland. Back home for a little bit to visit the family.”

“What?? Fuck Barry, why didn’t you tell me? I really need you right now. Please, can you cancel it?”

The inflection in her voice sounds like she’s going to start crying, and that’s one thing Barry can’t have. But he also has to lay low. He can’t put her in danger too.

“Sally… I really don’t know if I can…”

“God Barry I’m like freaking out and you're going home?! Like I know, it’s your family of course you have to see them but now? I just made probably the worst decision of my life and I needed you to help me through this. Like obviously I support you and I supported through everything you’ve done and your auditions and class and fuck everything but I feel like you don’t support me like I need you to.”

“What?” Barry blanches. “I support you, you know that. I’ve always supported you.”

“I know you do! You do!” Sally sounds almost upset that he does and he’s confused. The desk attendant announces his boarding group. He looks down at his ticket but doesn’t get out of his seat. “I just, I don’t know Barry. I don’t even know what I need from you but I need you to be here with me right now. You’ve never even talked about your family, I didn’t know you even talked to them. Did something happen? Did- did someone pass?”

“No uh…” Barry hesitates. What is he doing? “No, I don’t think so.”

“Then come back, please!” Sally falls silent. Barry does too. 

He has to go back. He has to. She’s right. She’s in a bad place and he shouldn't have left without an explanation no matter how bad his own situation was. Because that’s just how they were right?

“I think-” she finally says. “I think I just need someone to put me first, for once.”

What? Barry always put her first. Sally was his priority. Always. 

“I’m gonna call Lindsay, she’ll come over,” Sally continues. There’s so much passive aggression in her voice it makes Barry fume. “Have fun in Cleveland.”

“Yeah thanks,” he replies. He hangs up the phone and gets on his goddamn flight. He was doing this for her (partially). Whether she knew it or not.


	3. I think you're deeply human, Mr Human Icebox. -Gene Cousineau, Barry s2e4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Barry just got there, but so far? Maine is not it.

Barry couldn’t tell you the last time he had a dream, but he vaguely remembers a shrill voice yelling the words “trash mouth” as he shoots up in his economy class middle seat. His first flight to North Carolina is 4 and a half hours long and he was hoping to sleep through most of it. Even when he spent the first hour tossing as much as he could in his confined area. The screen in front of him tells him they should be landing in 48 minutes. At least he got almost 3 hours?

The layover is not much better. An hour and a half of his knee shaking involuntarily, and thinking that he should get something to eat but he isn’t hungry but he’s going to regret it later. Three times he got up to shake off some restless energy, walking around the Charlotte airport and never making a decision on food because there were too many options. The third time he loses track of time and almost doesn’t make it back to his boarding gate in time. As he boards the plane, he feels more than sees a man in first class’s eyes boring into the side of his head, which he pointedly does not make eye contact with. 

This plane is smaller, and noticeably less crowded. Apparently not many people are trying to fly into Maine this time of year. He gets a two seated row to himself, and stretches out between them as soon as possible. Sad as it sounds, it’s the best sleep he's had in days and the flight is only an hour and a half. 

The flight attendant shakes him awake when they land, and the plane is already empty. Bleary-eyed, he gets off the plane with his one bag, and heads to the rental car center. As he waits for an agent, he tiredly watches a kid across the parking lot accidentally let go of his red balloon. He watches it drift off into the cloudy sky and vaguely wonders where the hell he got a balloon from at this time of night.

The hour drive reluctantly introduces him to the sun, much to his dismay, and by the time he makes it to the townhouse he’s had enough time to contemplate his entire life three times over. He checks in with the receptionist and immediately passes out into a restless sleep. 

***

_ “Have you ever heard of a staph infection?” _

Barry blinks awake. He turns his head to his open window that’s letting in a humid breeze. Rubbing a hand over his eyes he wonders why the hell some kids are yelling about staph infections right outside his window. Out of sheer curiosity he gets up, stretches, and peeks out the window, but doesn’t see anyone outside. Must have come and gone quickly. His stomach growls. He knew not eating in Charlotte was going to bite him in the ass. 

His phone is dead, so he plugs it in and jumps in the shower, washing the plane and the smell of Los Angeles from his body. Showers have always felt mildly therapeutic, and he stays in there until the water goes cold. By the time he gets out and checks his phone it’s already 4:30 and he curses under his breath. 

He shoots a text to Mike asking him to meet up and heads down to reception. There’s nobody at the desk so he rings the bell a few times. An old man comes in from around the corner and greets him. 

“Hi, I had a package delivered here. I was wondering if it came in yet?”

“Let me check for you,” the man rasps, as if speaking at all should hurt him. “What’s the name?”

“Barry,” he responds, surprised by his voice. “Barry Berkman.”

The receptionist pulls out a set of keys from his pocket and using shaky hands takes a full 30 seconds to open the cabinet under the desk. Barry can hear him breathing through his mouth and wonders how this man is alive and working. He chants ‘Barry Berkman’ a few times under his breath as he searches, and Barry wonders how many people are sending packages to what seems like an empty inn. Eventually he pulls out a familiar package and places it slowly on the desk. 

“This you?”

“That’s me,” he takes it slowly as if grabbing it too quickly would frighten the man. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” the receptionist says. “You back in town for long?”

Barry pauses on his exit. “How do you figure I’ve been here before?”

“No one that comes to Derry as an adult didn’t grow up here.” Weird phrasing. “Everyone comes back.”

“Oh..?” Barry shifts. The man is making too much eye contact. “I’m uh, I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. Haven’t made much of a plan yet.”

The receptionist nods slowly. “Well you’re just in time for the town fair, plenty of activities for you and your friends.”

Barry starts getting a creeping feeling that this man knows something he doesn’t. Or maybe he’s just a weird old man. 

“Uh, thanks man. I’ll keep that in mind.” Barry makes a break for it and all but sprints to his car. He’s got a text from Mike asking if he can come to the library in an hour. His stomach makes a loud angry noise as he tosses the package onto the passenger seat. Just enough time to grab something to eat. 

***

The library is big. Bigger than he ever expected it would be. What kind of a tiny, off the map town needs a library this big? Barry gawks as he pulls into a parking space, then turns to his unopened package. He tears it open to get to two hand guns and four mags. One of which he loads and tucks in his waistband, the other he puts in the glove compartment along with the three extra mags. He doesn’t know what he’s getting into. 

When he enters the library there’s already a tall dark and handsome man bounding toward him, and he’s on the defense. 

“Barry!” the man cheers when he’s close enough, and before he knows what’s happening he’s being wrapped in a hug. He recognizes that voice. 

“Mike?” he asks softly, frozen in this hug with a man he doesn’t know.

“Yeah,” Mike pulls away, but keeps his hands on his shoulders. “Sorry, yeah. I’m Mike.” He pats his shoulder and releases him, which only relieves some of the tension buried there. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, uh,” Barry says awkwardly. “You too.”

Mike just looks at him for a moment, which brings back some of the tension. 

“Wow,” he says with no explanation, shaking his head. “Just wow.”

Barry wants to ask a follow-up question but is also kind of afraid of the answer. Mike starts up again too quickly anyway. 

“Come on, let’s go to my office.”

Barry blindly follows him across the library and up three flights of stairs. He notes the emptiness of the library which, to be fair, is not highly uncommon for libraries, but it still puts him on edge. 

“We’ve only got a little bit before we meet with the others,” Mike is saying as he pulls out his keys going up another flight of stairs. “But I didn’t want to bombard you with everything and everyone all at once.” Mike opens a door at the top of the library and leads him into a room. 

The room is a mess and not well lit, and Barry’s fingers are twitching instinctively toward his waistband. Then he spots an unmade bed, a refrigerator, and realizes, “Is this where you live?”

Mike sheepishly grabs some things off the counter and throws them into his trash. “My humble abode.” He waves him over to a table completely covered in papers and books. Shoving some papers into a pile and off to the side, he snaps some books shut and stacks them on the pile of papers, covering their contents. He then grabs everything left and slides them closer toward where Barry stands beside him. 

“So,” he starts, looking Barry dead in the eye. “What do you remember about your childhood?”

Barry blanches. This is not the question he was expecting. Then again, he didn’t know what to expect. “Excuse me?”

“Your childhood,” Mike repeats like it’s a simple question. And it should be, Barry guesses. “Do you remember anything about it?”

“Um, no,” Barry shifts uncomfortably. “Not really. PTSD from the army doesn’t help, I think. That's what my therapist said when I left at least.”

“Your therapist after you left the army?” Mike asks. 

“Yeah? I haven’t seen her in a while but yeah. She said PTSD can give you selective amnesia for certain things and no one but your brain knows why.”

Mike nods and pulls a laptop toward them. He has way too many windows and tabs open, Barry notes. “You said you left the army in ‘07, right?”

“Yeah. August.”

Mike finds the window he’s looking for and turns it toward him. “The thing is, I looked for you. Army enlistment records are public information. I couldn’t find a trace of any Barry or Bartholomew or Barrfind, or any rendition of the name, Berkman.” 

Barry’s mind is blank. “That- that doesn’t make any sense. I was in Afghanistan.” He searches through the records pulled up as Mike opens some files for him too. 

“I searched everywhere,” Mike says. “I pulled a few strings from other research branches, there are zero records of Barry Berkman anywhere.”

It’s like every thought he didn’t have before hits him all at once. Like his thoughts are a crowd of frantic Black Friday shoppers and the doors just opened, and he can’t put a finger on one of them for long enough to actually understand what they’re saying. What does this mean? Why isn’t he listed? Why, for god’s sake is he telling him this? Is that a cat in the corner or are the shadows playing tricks on him? Where the hell is Barry Berkman, who was definitely enlisted and stationed in Afghanistan, on the records? Can the government expunge a soldier completely? Would they do that when he was discharged with no issue? 

His brain pauses. Actually he didn’t doubt that one. 

That’s what it had to be. He was discharged from the army and it sure wasn’t an honorable one. So they wiped it. Right? That makes sense. Right?

Mike drops a book full of polaroids and photos in front of him. For a moment there Barry’d forgotten he was there. The photos in the book look old. Like they were taken 30 years ago old. 

“This is me,” Mike says pointing at a young kid in one of the photos. Ah, so they probably are actually 30 years old. Mike slides his finger across the photo, over the faces of 5 kids grinning at the camera, and stops at the kid on the end. “This is my friend, Richie.”

Barry blinks at the kid, trying to take his mind out of the army and into this abrupt new topic. He’s got long hair and glasses that make his eyes look the size of his mouth. So? “The guy you called me about?”

“Yeah,” Mike nods, seemingly happy that Barry remembers and is keeping up. “Richie Tozier. Total nut. One of the best guys I know.” Mike rifles through a folder Barry hadn’t even seen and pulls out some articles. “From what I’ve been able to recover, Richie was last in Columbus Ohio. That’s where you’re from, right?”

Barry nods. So what? There’s a lot of people in Columbus. 

“He drops off the face of the earth after that,” Mike continues. He pulls the computer back toward him and Barry is so unfocused he looks at the space it just was for a moment before following to where Mike is clicking through various open tabs. “The last trace of him that I could find is this.” Mike turns the screen back to him. It’s a social media post with nine likes. It doesn’t make anything tick in Barry’s brain until Mike taps to the next photo. 

That man looks jarringly like Barry. And not in a conceited way like that’s a handsome man and they happen to look alike. In a way that somehow, this man has the same face as Barry, but with longer hair, glasses, and what looks like a genuine smile on his face. 

Does he have a long lost twin? There’s no way that that man is him, he doesn’t look on the brink of depression even 10 years ago. And now that he thinks that, it sounds pretty sad, but hey, who’s going to hear how sad his internal monologue is? Or no, someone told him once that there’s 7 people in the world who look just like you. He’d never actually thought about it until now but that makes sense right? He’s gotta be one of 7. 

There has to be a way for this to make sense. 

“The last post is from July of 2007,” Mike says, bringing him out of his thoughts. Because somehow, without fail, Barry always gets so caught up in his thoughts he almost forgets where he is. 

He tries to add that piece of information to the puzzle. It is a puzzle after all. The thing that Mike is trying to help him figure out. But it’s one he can’t solve.

“July of 2007,” Barry repeats. 

Mike nods. “A month before any record of you I could find.”

Barry takes another second, but still shakes his head. He has a horrible feeling in his gut. “I don’t think- I don’t think I’m following along. I don’t know what you want me to conclude from this.”

“Barry,” Mike says softly. He waits to see if Barry will look up at him. He doesn’t. “Barry I think you were a John Doe.”

Barry’s stomach drops. The horrible feeling in his gut gets worse. It’s the area that usually tells him to get the fuck out of there. He can feel his heartbeat at the base of his head, and with every beat it feels as though he's getting jabbed lightly with a needle. “No.”

“And I think somebody claimed you,” Mike continues like Barry isn’t going through the worst minute in his life. 

Barry is backing up, shaking his head. “No. No, no, no.” Each no is announced with less and less confidence in its backing. “It doesn’t make sense.” His head is pounding. His thoughts are screaming at him but it’s all incoherent. His breathing is heavy, are there two Mike’s now? Does he have a twin too? “I was-” he shakes his head again. “I was in the army, I have memories.”

Mike cautiously takes one step toward him. Not that Barry notices. “Barry, I couldn’t even find a hospital record of your birth.”

“No!” Barry yells. “I’m a person! I existed! I had a family! … I think- I think I had a family.” He squeezes his eyes shut and slams his palms into his forehead, which sends a searing pain through not his head, but his arm. He pulls his arms away to be unpleasantly reminded of the mystery scar on his hand, now happily throbbing along to the suffocating breathing pattern he didn’t know he adopted. “I was in the Marines,” he says again. “I had friends, memories. Vaughn and Taylor and- and-” a shuddering breath rips through him.  _ Chris. _ Those are real. They’re real memories. There’s no way. 

“Barry,” Mike’s voice comes again. His head shoots up without his permission, and he wishes it didn’t. Mike’s face is so soft, placating, an attempt to be comforting meanwhile he’s tearing Barry’s whole world apart. “What do you remember about your childhood? Or the 90’s? About before 2007?”

For the life of him he can’t remember anything. And usually his memory is pretty good under pressure, if he does say so himself. Not this kind of pressure. This isn’t like anything he’s ever felt before and he Does Not Like It. His body feels like it doesn’t belong to him but he can still feel the pain his body and his brain is beating him with. 

“Barry, take a breath,” Mike says faintly, and he realizes he’s lightly hyperventilating. “Tell me about your parents.” 

“My parents,” Barry repeats, trying to get a grip on a memory. Any memory. Hazy memories of people flash through his mind but they’re all different people. Fuches, Mr Cousineau, semi-father figures. A flash of the man he thought was his drill sergeant if he even really existed. A man he doesn’t even recognize. A woman who looks like comfort but wouldn’t come near him. His hands are shaking. “My parents,” he says again. “They- they died.” It takes a big gulp to get past the lump in his throat. ”There- I think there was a car crash? I don’t really remember. I was young.”

Mike nods. “I’m not saying this to freak you out, Richie’s parents died in a car crash when he was 23. Richie was in the car. He didn’t die, but he suffered from amnesia.” 

Barry tried to remember when he was 23. Why could he not remember when he was 23? It wasn’t that long ago. It was only what? Fuck. 18 years ago. Shouldn’t he remember something though? He would have been looking at the army at that point, right? When did he enlist? For gods sake what year did he enlist?

“There was another car crash in Columbus. A month before I found you. A John Doe,” Mike continues as Barry backs into a wall and slides down it. Mike crouches, keeping his distance but wanting to look at him as he tells him his theory. “People who have had amnesia due to trauma, who experience another trauma, it sometimes tends to trigger another bout of amnesia. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.” Mike pauses, because it only seems humane. “I think yours might have been worse.”

There's a faint ringing in his head. His elbows are on his knees so he can tap the heels of his hands on his head. “I have- I had- I… memories. I have memories.”

Mike reaches out to put a hand on Barry’s knee, but hesitates. He doesn’t really seem much like someone who finds physical touch a comfort in crisis. “Is there anyone from your past life you know? That came with you? Do you remember anyone?”

Barry groans, shaking his head miserably. No siblings, dead parents, no extended family that he could think of, just... “Fuches.”

“Who?”

“Monroe Fuches,” Barry tells him, much to his dismay. “He was- he was a family friend, or something. He was my handler.”

“Your handler?” Mike sounds confused, and Barry realizes as much as Mike knows about what he thinks could be his past life, he doesn’t know about his current life. He shakes his head again. 

“He got me discharged from the army,” he tries again. “He’d been taking care of me since. Helping out.”

“Monroe Fuches,” Mike repeats. And fuck. Maybe Barry shouldn’t have said that. Sold him out to a man he just met from a phone call for the wrong number. But also, fuck Fuches. 

Fuches picked him up after he got him discharged. Fuches took care of him when he had his breakdowns. Fuches got him work, he handled the business. Fuches talked him through his selective memory loss from the army. Fuches… he couldn’t remember knowing him before he got discharged. He knew him though. He was a family friend. He- he knew Barry. 

Right?

“I have to get out of here,” Barry announces, scrambling up from the floor. 

“What?” Mike says, a little panicked. He can’t lose Ric- Barry. Not this close. 

“I need some air,” Barry makes his way to where he vaguely remembers the exit being. The door makes a loud bang as it hits the wall when he swings it open too hard. 

“Barry, please,” Mike is following him. Almost begging. Barry’s legs are long but Mike can keep up. “Where are you going?”

Barry is breathing hard, all but running toward fresh air. He shakes his head again. “I can’t- I can’t breathe in here.”

They get to the entrance of the library faster than Mike’s ever gotten there himself. Barry shoves the door open and steps out, taking a deep breath but not stopping. Mike stays in the threshold. 

“Will you come back?” he calls after him. Barry doesn’t answer. “Will you come to dinner?”

He watches Barry as he speed walks away, shoulders heaving. He knows it was a lot of information to throw at him, but what was he supposed to do? Was there any other way to tell him? Dinner will be interesting, if he still hasn’t fully accepted it and he’s met with childhood friends he doesn’t remember. 

But he lets him go, hopeful that he’ll be there. Desperate for him to be there. But he needs some time. He takes a deep breath of fresh air just as Barry did, and goes back into the library. 

Barry isn’t running. Not physically at least. Mentally his mind won’t slow down and physiologically his lungs can’t keep up. He’s panicking. Why won’t any of this make sense? Why can’t he remember anything about his past? He remembers being in the army. He remembers being in Korengal. He remembers things. Right? 

But he can’t remember past that. Hell, he can barely remember in between that. He can vaguely picture his parents, but that’s mostly because of photos Fuches showed him. Right? No, he had to have a memory. Any memory. Come on brain. Anything. 

Honestly he doesn’t really remember that much before LA. It was just job after job after job. He just figured that was part of the depression. 

He clenches his fists, a habit he can’t seem to break, and feels the scar on his hand again. He brings it up to his face, squinting in the dark of the sunset. It looks deep, and it looks old. It’s something he definitely would have, should have noticed before yesterday. Deep enough to hurt, to leave a memory with it. 

But he doesn’t know. 

He continues walking, and debates the one thing he doesn’t want to do. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and finally stops on the outside of an underpass, and leans on a rickety old fence under a rickety old street lamp. 

He calls Fuches. Partially to demand information about his past, partially to yell at him for selling him out and trying to kill Mr Cousineau, completely to scream at him for ruining his life. In possibly many more ways than one.

There’s a glimmer in his peripherals. His head snaps to the other side of the underpass. Someone is looking at him. He can’t make out who. A chill racks through his body. Enough to briefly startle him out of his crisis

His hand lowers his phone from his ear as he turns his attention. Faintly, Fuches’s automated voicemail begins and quickly ends with a beep. Barry turns his full attention to this onlooker. He waits for the person to do something now that they’ve both acknowledged each other, but they don’t. Barry looks down at his phone and hangs up. When he looks back up the person is gone. Like they were never there in the first place. He takes a cautious step forward. Then another. Then another. 

His right arm wraps around his back as he advances, ready to draw his gun at a split second’s notice. 

He gets to the spot the person was. There’s no one there. There’s nothing there. He peers over the fence and into the hill on the other side. It’s too dark to see anything. Turning on the flashlight on his phone doesn’t help. Nothing is disturbed on the other side. He’d only looked down at his phone for less than a second, where could they have gone? 

What a weird fucking town. 


	4. Memory, It's a funny thing. - Mike, It Chapter 2 (2019)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even the neon sign outside the Jade of the Orient doesn't seem inviting.

By the time he gets to the restaurant the sun is completely gone. He’d been wandering for what? An hour? An hour and a half? Who knows, honestly. He got lost, constantly peering over his shoulder for any new strange appearance. There were too many things on his mind to focus on one. He doesn’t even know how he got there to be honest. Something in his bones, in his legs, knows this town. Something about it feels familiar, but he’s still not sure why. 

Well, if his meeting with Mike is any indication, he does know why. 

But that’s just a theory.

So he’s here. Across the street from Jade of the Orient, its neon lights a beacon in the night. He walks toward it slowly, shaking stress and unease from his hands. It’s not ideal, but he’d rather just go to this dinner with people that claim they knew him than go back to LA. Also, for some reason the darkness is starting to skeeve him out and he’d rather not be in the townhouse on his own in a weird ass fucking town he dropped everything to hide out in. And he told Mike he would. 

He doesn’t know what he was hoping for, but the journey from across the street to the front door provides him no further clarity and there’s someone blocking the entrance. Two people actually, he realizes as he steps closer. They’re hugging. 

Barry pauses for a moment, not wanting to interrupt the moment. 

Then another moment passes. 

This is a weirdly long hug. 

Maybe he can step around them. 

He approaches quietly, hoping to squeeze along the wall and just slip by, but as soon as he gets close they pull apart. “It’s been so long,” the guy is saying. Damn, he’s a tall motherfucker. Barry’s too close and he freezes mid-step. 

The woman spots him, even though he’s frozen, and turns her head in his direction while still facing the man. Her short red hair takes on different colors in the red and green fluorescents, and when she beams at him something stirs in his gut. 

_ Who invited Molly Ringwald into the group? _

“Hey man,” the guy says, and Barry is pulled out of a locked gaze with the woman. He’s grinning at him too for some reason and, dear god, is he coming in for a hug? Was that full minute hug not enough for this guy?

“It’s Ben,” the guy says happily right before squeezing Barry tighter than he ever wanted to be squeezed. 

“Um, hi Ben,” Barry confusedly pats him on the back and hopes to be let go soon. When he does, the woman is still smiling at him. 

“Richie,” she greets, and everything clicks into place. She gestures to herself, says “Beverly,” then also comes in for a hug. He guesses a hug is the easiest excuse to take a second to rack all of his thoughts together. 

“Actually, um,” he says, pulling away. “I’m uh-, I’m Barry.”

Both Ben and Beverly’s faces fall into one of confusion, and then quickly into one of embarrassment. 

“I’m so sorry,” Beverly is saying. “We thought you were someone else.”

“Sorry man,” Ben says at the same time. 

“Yeah no, Richie,” Barry says, shaking his head like it’s no big deal when it is, in fact, a big deal. “I’ve actually… gotten that before.”

Their faces slip further into confusion. They look to each other and look back at him, apparently having not settled on something to respond to that. 

“It’s hard to explain,” Barry says in lieu of an explanation. “Are you guys going in to meet Mike?”

Their faces change again, and Barry thinks he should be taking notes on their expressions so that maybe he can use them in an acting exercise in the future. Ben looks like he wants to say something before Beverly puts her hand on his arm and answers first. 

“Yes, we are,” she looks over her shoulder at the door she’s blocking and waves her arm toward it. “Shall we?”

Barry nods and Ben smiles uncomfortably, but follows them in nonetheless. Beverly greets the hostess, who leads them into a private dining area. 

“So, Barry,” Ben starts as they follow the hostess. “How do you know Mike?”

“He kind of just uh-” Beverly almost trips on a step down. Ben catches her by the elbow to steady her, and gives her a smile as she thanks him softly, looking into her eyes. It’s a moment Barry feels like he should give them some privacy for. But Ben turns back to him just as quickly, so he continues. “He kind of just called me the other day.”

Ben nods. “Yeah, same here.”

Barry pulls his eyes away as they turn the corner and they immediately fall onto a small gong at the front of the private room. On pure animal instinct, before he can stop himself from doing something so entirely out of character, he picks up the mallet and bangs the gong. 

The reverberations of the gong sound in his ear much longer than the realization of what he just did hits him. He stares in horror at his hand holding the mallet, and then up into 5 pairs of eyes watching him. He doesn’t know what to say. 

Ben turns to save him. “This meeting of the Loser’s club has officially begun,” he announces. 

A shorter guy in a red jacket grins at them and comments, “Look at these guys.”

They stand there for a moment, taking each other in, and it’s awkward. It’s so awkward. Maybe he shouldn’t have come. The other five are looking at each other with fond looks, but it feels like the guy called them “these guys” because he actually couldn’t remember their names. Do they even know each other?

Barry scans the group, sizing them up. It’s an old habit he can’t seem to break in new environments, and he takes everyone in. 

Ben, tall, body built like a soccer player, surprisingly kind so far but can definitely take Barry on.

Beverly, short but strong, composed. 

Mike, a friendly face that might have destroyed his psychological health.

The man to his left, salt-and-pepper hair held confidently, a leader if he’s ever seen one. 

And the guy in the red jacket, looks anxiety ridden and out of place. His eyes jump around the room, taking everyone in, but when his eyes land on Barry his face softens. Then immediately hardens as if he’s defensive. What the hell is Barry supposed to take from that?

Ben is the first to move, stepping forward with that same smile on his face. The Salt-and-Pepper Man moves to meet him. “Big Bill,” he hears him greet. Bill, then. They hug briefly, then Ben moves on to Mike and Red Jacket Guy. Bill steps up to Beverly. They grin at each other, just looking at each other before moving to hug as well. 

Barry keeps his distance, hoping to blend in with the background and avoid all the hugging. That is, until Red Jacket Guy comes up to him, apparently still on the defense. 

“What’s up, Trashmouth,” is what he opens with. 

Barry blinks at him and recoils a little bit. Now he’s on the defensive. “Excuse me?”

Red Jacket Guy’s eyebrows crinkle, and frown lines appear on his forehead. 

“Um, actually,” Mike interrupts, pulling himself away from Beverly to stand next to Barry and put a hand on his shoulder. “Everyone, this is Barry.” Mike looks to him for confirmation, and Barry gulps. What is he supposed to do? Also, is Mike gonna out him about his whole….. situation? He has no idea what to say, so he just nods. Mike nods back. “He’s from LA.”

Bill’s eyebrows cross in confusion too, and he looks across to Ben and Beverly, who just shrug. Barry waves sheepishly. Bill recovers and steps forward. 

“Barry,” he repeats with a hand outstretched. “Nice to meet you, I’m Bill.”

Thank god, not a hug. “Hi Bill,” he shakes his hand. It’s warm to the touch. 

“I guess you’ve met Ben and Bev,” Mike continues. They both nod at him with polite smiles. “And this is Eddie.”

Red Jacket Guy, Eddie, is still staring at him quizzically. It sends a shiver down his back. Barry actually doesn’t think he’s stopped staring, borderline glaring at him since he stepped up to him and… insulted him? Was it an insult? Either way he doesn’t like it. And it’s not putting him on edge, but it’s kind of putting him on edge. 

“Is there a problem,  _ Eddie? _ ” Barry has never felt so confrontational toward anyone he just met in his life. He says his name with a subtle hint of hostility, he doesn’t know from where. 

Eddie fumes, apparently feeling confrontational as well. 

“Eddie, Eddie,” Ben says placating at the same time a waitress comes in asking if they're ready to place a drink order. 

Mike and Ben usher them all to the table, placing drink orders as they pass by the waitress. Barry is last to order a beer and there’s two chairs left. Choosing to sit next to Beverly, he very deliberately leaves an empty seat between him and Eddie.

The five friends who clearly remember most or at least some of their past fall easily into conversation, and Barry can only do his best to keep up. They laugh easily and often, teasing each other even though from what he can put together, they haven’t seen each other in over 25 years. Beer is poured, mounds upon mounds of food is served, even Eddie is in a better mood when Bill orders a round of shots for the table. Beverly and Bill cheer when they’re delivered to the table, and they all join in as they clink their shot glasses together and throw back their whiskey. Barry smiles as he looks on, partaking as he feels the goosebumps of discomfort leave the back of his neck. His eyes catch Eddie’s, whose gaze is still hard, but much softer than before. Eddie throws his shot back and Barry does the same. 

It’s the least tense Barry has ever felt, he thinks probably in his entire life. 

The stories they tell sound fun, like they could be familiar. Like it would be a childhood Barry could happily get lost in. That he would happily claim if he knew that it was actually his. Occasionally, Ben or Beverly or Bill would tell a story and turn to him, like he should know what happens next, and he so wishes that he did. He knows that Richie is in that story, most of these stories probably. But he doesn’t know if he’s Richie. Not yet. 

Mostly he stays quiet, listening on, watching, eating some surprisingly good chinese food in the most indulgent way he has in a long time. It’s nice, and he has a solid buzz going on, which he usually wouldn’t allow himself to get. 

“Can we talk about the elephant  _ not _ in the room?” Bill says, and suddenly the tension is back. Barry sits up a little straighter and stares into Bill’s profile. “Ben,” he continues, and Barry releases a breath so heavy it surprises him as well as Beverly next to him. “I mean, wow man.”

“Okay okay,” Ben chuckles sheepishly. “Obviously I lost a few pounds.” 

“Lost a few pounds?” Mike asks incredulously. 

“Yeah no shit you lost a few pounds,” Eddie exclaims at him. “You’re like- you’re hot.”

“Like every Brazillian soccer player rolled into one,” Bill laughs. “Gorgeous.”

“Leave him alone,” Beverly defends, while also giving him a side look like she completely agrees. “You’re embarrassing him.” 

It does no good, of course, when they all continue laughing. 

“Okay, okay, alright, please,” Ben begs. “Come on. Is Stanley coming or what? Someone save me.” 

A piercing jab of nausea rolls through his body, and he has to brace the table to steady himself. 

A similar feeling seems to drift across the table, though no one seemingly as affected as Barry. 

“Stan,” Eddie says, leaning back into his chair. Bill smiles at the name but can’t figure out where to place it. 

They look to the empty seat in between Eddie and Barry, Barry included this time. 

“Stan…” Bill tries. Mike waits patiently for them to get their thoughts together as a group. 

“Stan.. Uris,” Beverly questions.

“Stan Uris,” Bill agrees with more confidence. 

“Stan Urine,” Barry gasps. It’s barely above a whisper. “Stanley Urine.”

He has to breathe. He has to physically remind himself to breathe. The air is heavier than it was before, there’s too much moisture, there’s too much noise. 

Eddie is the only one to speak. 

“How did you know that?”

Barry looks up in a panic. He locks eyes with Mike, frantic. Mike’s eyes are shining, giddy, ecstatic that he was right.

“How the  _ fuck _ did you know that,  _ Barry? _ ” Eddie demands. The hostility is back, but Barry barely hears it. He barely hears anything.

“Eddie,” Beverly scolds, gently putting a supportive hand on Barry’s arm. Eddie’s mouth snaps shut, but he still fumes. If Barry was any more aware of his surroundings, he would almost be able to see the gears in his head turning rapidly, releasing steam it probably shouldn’t, allowing Eddie to jump to 15 different conclusions. Because if there was anything Eddie exceeded at, it’s jumping to conclusions. 

But he’s not that aware of his surroundings, and he doesn’t know the inside workings of Eddie's brain. Not like Richie did.

Beverly looks at Barry, who has not broken eye contact with Mike in his slouched over form. She turns to Mike. “Mike, what’s going on?”

Barry watches Mike lean closer from across the table, not paying much mind to the rest of them. “Barry,” he says gently. “What do you remember?”

Barry shakes his head. He denies the feeling of pin pricks at the edges of his eyes, and pushes his chair away from the table and leans his elbows on his knees, dropping his head into his hands and shaking it miserably. “Nothing,” he responds in a groan. “Nothing. Just the name.”

He can’t see any of them, but he can feel the stares of everyone at the table digging into him, deeper and deeper, as Mike tries to find the coffin of a boy he claims to have known hidden somewhere inside of him that he wasn’t even aware he was harboring. It's not a feeling he thought he would ever have to feel, but so much worse than he had thought it would be at the same time. 

Who is he?

Can they tell him?

“That’s okay, Barry,” Mike is saying softly. “It’s okay.”

“I don’t know if it is,” Barry returns. 

“Mike,” he hears Bill saying, concern laced in his voice. “What’s going on?”

“I- I think Barry is Richie.”

“I fucking knew it!” Eddie exclaims, earning him a shove from Ben. 

There’s a pause before Mike speaks again. 

“Is it okay if I tell them, Barry?”

Barry doesn’t move. He’s slouched so low at this point his forehead is almost touching his knees. There’s a rubbing on his back that he assumes is comforting from Beverly’s point of view, but is honestly making him a little more nauseous. He reluctantly nods his head like it weighs more than he could think to carry. 

“From what I’ve been able to recover,” he hears Mike start and groans into his knees. “Richie was in a car crash when he was 23. He survived, but he suffered from amnesia. As far as I can tell, he recovered. He checked out of the hospital two years later, and went on with his life until 2007. In July 2007 Richie went to Cleveland and disappeared. There was also a car crash with one victim: a John Doe. In August 2007, Barry Berkman appeared on records. The only records of a Barry Berkman that I could find. Ever.”

There’s a pause and Barry can hear the anticipation emanating from the group. His jaw clenches. Beverly’s hand has stopped moving on his back. He has a new headache coming on. 

“I think Richie was in that car accident, and that triggered his amnesia in the worst case scenario. I think he forgot who he was entirely, and then I think someone claimed him and made him believe that he was someone else. And Barry lived in this new life.”

“What the fuck?” Eddie. 

“Who would do that?” Beverly.

“How is that even possible?” Ben.

“Why would anyone do that?” Bill. 

“I don’t know,” Mike announces over everyone. “We haven’t gotten that far yet. This is the first breakthrough.”

Mike sounds like he’s proud of the progress, so Barry shoots his head up to glare at him. His head spins a little but it does the job because the small smile he has on his face falters. 

“What can we do?” Bill asks. 

“Don’t overwhelm him?” Mike shrugs, knowing full well he was going to overwhelm all of them by the end of the night.

Eddie throws up his hands. “Well how the fuck are we supposed to do that, after that bombshell you just dropped?”

“Just ease up, Eddie,” Ben soothes next to him. “Give him some space, he needs some time to process.”

“So the fuck do I,” Eddie objects immediately. 

“Stan!” Beverly interjects. Barry flinches. Beverly pretends not to notice. “Is Stanley coming, Mike?”

“I called him like I called all of you,” Mike shrugs. “I’m sure he’ll be here.”

“Stan the Man,” Bill recalls with a smile. 

Eddie shakes his head but accepts the conversation change. “Why would Stan have saved you anyway? Was I not the one who basically performed surgery on you when Bowers cut you up- holy shit that’s right.”

Barry’s tension eases up the tiniest amount as he focuses on Eddie’s voice becoming increasingly more incredulous as he continues speaking. He’s doing his best to not think about how this ruins everything he thought about his life. Even though it does. He’s doing his best to distract himself from the obvious even though his entire body is screaming at him, echoing the names Richie and Stan in his mind. So he focuses on Eddie’s voice. Slightly hysterical, low-key irritating, somewhat comforting? There’s not enough time to focus on that when Beverly, like a normal person, continues the conversation. 

“Please tell me you ended up becoming a doctor, Eddie.”

Eddie’s voice is back, and now Barry is just confused about why his voice feels soothing when he does not give off any type of soothing energy. Only restless and urgent. 

“No, I uh- I actually became a risk analyst.”

Barry listens to him explain what exactly risk assessment is and it’s possibly the most boring thing he’s ever heard. Was this job invented before fun?

But it works. Focusing on this monotonous story instead of the tingling on his skin or how it slowly fades away, the concentration in his brain slowly becoming easier, the depth and quickness of his breathing becoming less shallow. An anchor from this whole crazy situation. He’s finally able to lift his head from his hands when Ben is telling them about his architecture firm. He’s able to look around again at what he highly suspects might be his childhood friends when Bill shares the premise of his new book. He makes eye contact with Bill and it doesn’t make him immediately want to vomit. 

“What about you, Barry,” he asks. “What do you do?”

“Uhh…” his palms are sweaty. He rubs them on his jeans. “I uh- I work in auto parts.”

Barry watches his eyebrows go up. He blinks. He looks around the table and everyone has a subtly surprised look on their face that only Bill and Mike vaguely try to disguise. 

“Oh,” Ben finally says, nodding. “Auto-parts. That’s cool. Like... do you have a garage?”

Barry glances around the table again. Guess that’s not what Richie would do. “No I uh- I’m also an actor?”

This one spurs some reaction. Some strange noises of… what is that? Confirmation? Understanding? 

Eddie nods his head to the side and mumbles, “Yeah that tracks.”

Ben snorts lightly next to him and tries to disguise it as a cough. He looks around and Bill is smiling at him too. He knows he doesn’t know the Richie they grew up with, but it gives him a feeling of vindication in his decision to drop being a hitman for acting. 

“What kind of acting?” Beverly asks next to him, placing her chin in her hand with a smile.

“Uh, stage right now,” he does his best to maintain eye contact with her. “We’ve put on a few plays and wrote some of our own stuff. We actually just had a big performance at a big theater in LA a couple days ago.” 

“That’s really cool, Barry,” Ben grins at him. Barry smiles, and sinks into conversations about life, listening to stories of childhood that he pictures himself in, bonding with these people like they just met, and feeling like they’re sort of all meeting for the first time too. As the night goes on and they remember more about their childhood, they delve into happier, friendlier, perhaps more childish attitudes. Barry doesn’t mind as much when they look at him in reference to Richie, because, maybe he wants this theory to be true. He wants to belong to this group. He wants Richie’s childhood to be his childhood. Even if he couldn’t remember it. Not yet. 

“I propose a toast,” Beverly announces so that Eddie and Ben would stop arguing briefly. She raises her glass. “To the Losers.”

Everyone cheers and raises their glasses and bottles. Barry smiles, feeling comfortable enough to join in. Mike beams at him when he does. They clink their drinks together in a messy encounter, splashing beer around the table and laughing. By the time they’re finished and the waitress comes with a bowl full of fortune cookies, Barry feels better than he thinks he’s ever felt before, probably helped by the amount of beer he’s had. 

“Thank you,” Eddie tells her, more polite than Barry’s heard all night. They all dig into the beginning of the end of a nostalgic reunion of a childhood none of them can fully remember, but look forward to. Barry doesn’t think he’s had a fortune cookie in probably three years, and the crack of its shell is immensely satisfying. They break off into separate conversations, Beverly and Bill leaned in close to each other, and Eddie on a rant about type 2 diabetes that Barry feels is medically inaccurate but he doesn’t know enough about the subject to dispute it. He’s in the middle of saying some odd thing that would apparently make him shit his pants, how they got here Barry doesn’t know, when Ben chimes in to Bill and Beverly’s conversation across the table.

“I mean it’s weird, right?” he starts, suddenly looking like maybe he shouldn’t have said anything but powering through. “Now that we’re all here everything just comes back faster and faster. I mean all of it.” 

Barry can only partially relate, but everyone makes silent agreements. He notes Mike shifting in his chair, a sudden change in atmosphere.

“Yeah, you know when Mike called me I uh- I sort of… crashed my car,” Eddie adds. “And- and that’s never happened but like I got nervous and I felt like I was gonna be sick and it- and it just happened.”

“Seriously?” Bill gapes at him. 

“Yeah,” Eddie nods, no longer making eye contact with anyone. 

“When Mike called me I threw up,” Barry says quietly. All heads turn to him. “Isn’t that weird? I didn’t know who he was, I didn’t remember anything, I just threw up for no reason.” He’s met with silent stares and he barrels on nervously. “I mean I feel fine now, I’m glad I came and I feel relieved to be here with you guys, just, y’know… intense.”

“Shit man, I hear you,” Ben agrees. “I mean, my heart was literally like pounding right out of my chest.”

“I thought it was only me,” Beverly breathes. 

“It was like pure f-f-f-” Bill stutters. Did he stutter before and Barry just missed it? “F-ff-”

“Fear,” Mike finishes for him, looking up from the table for the first time since they shifted topics. “It’s fear, what you’re feeling.”

Bill looks back at him, a nervous glint in his eye. “Why did we all feel like that, Mike?” Mike breaks eye contact again, which is unacceptable. “You remember something we don’t, don’t you?”

There’s another shift, and Barry doesn’t think he likes it at all.

“Something happens to you when you leave this town,” Mike explains to Bill, then looks away again. Down at the table, and reluctantly up to the rest of the group. “The farther away the hazier it all gets. But me, I never left. So yeah, I remember.” He turns back to Bill. “I remember all of it.”

Ominous. And not a curious ominous. An ominous that Barry doesn’t think he wants to know more. 

But he doesn’t have a choice when Beverly whispers, “Pennywise.”

A fire alarm goes off in Barry’s head, but as fire alarms do, it doesn’t tell him where the fire is. Just that there is one. 

“Oh the fucking clown,” Eddie swears, following it with a shuddering breath and instinctively reaching for something that isn’t in his pocket. 

“Oh shit,” Ben agrees. 

“Pennywise,” Barry repeats softly to himself. The alarms in his head get louder, loud enough to make his ears ring, but no memory comes up. Not yet. 

“Mike,” Bill takes the lead again. “You said you wanted our help with something, what was that?” 

Mike gulps and it does nothing to soothe the nerves going around the table. “There’s an echo, here in Derry, that bounces back every 27 years.”

“What are you talking about,” Eddie says, soft and shaky, but it seems like he has an idea.

“Hold on,” Mike puts out a hand that looks like it’s meant to be placating but does no such favor. “Listen, listen.”

“No, I don’t...” Eddie objects with not much power. 

“We thought we stopped it back then,” Mike continues. “We thought it was done, but-”

Bodies. There are bodies in Derry. Barry thought he was getting away from the death and the murdering and the bodies by coming to Derry. He thought he was going to be clear from life threats and fighting and people out to get him. He was supposed to be getting away from it. But Mike is listing off deaths and missing persons that he’s noted down in his notebook for some reason and sharing with the class who didn’t even remember who he was three days ago. Objections rise around the table as Mike gets flustered, sure that more death, more pain is on the horizon and the team that he gathered doesn’t want to hear about it. 

“Let him explain,” Ben argues. “Let him explain. 

Please do, Barry thinks. But also, please for the love of god, don’t.

But he does. And Barry is left with an ominous threat of some clown echo that bounces back every 27 years that changed all of them, and that it’s back. And he doesn’t want to know what unfinished business this group has with this echo, but he has this horrible feeling that he’s going to find out soon enough. 

Silence drowns the table as they absorb this information they didn’t want, and the sound of another fortune cookie cracking sounds more like a threat than anything. He’s surprised the cookie didn’t fall apart in Eddie’s hands, the way he broke it. Eddie huffs an unamused laugh. 

“My fortune cookie just says ‘Could.’”

Barry didn’t even look at his before, just ate the cookie because he liked the crunch. He picks it up from the table and reads it. “Mine just says ‘Guess.’”

Something in Bill’s jaw ticks, and he notices Bill has a fortune in his hand. “You wanna throw that over here?”

Barry passes it across the table as Bill stands and clears the Lazy Suzy in the center. Mike hands his over as well, followed by Ben and Eddie who stand when they realize what Bill is doing. 

Now, Barry has never been one for word games or puzzles. Sure, he can think on his feet and figure his way out of life threatening situations (that, to be honest, he put himself in), but words? He doesn’t even remember his high school english class. Hell, most of the big words he knows is because of the plays they’ve put on. Shakespeare and all that shit. This? This is something else. It’s a message, Mike keeps saying. But what the fuck kind of message is this supposed to be? Are they even sure they want to figure it out?

Guess. It. Could. Not. Cut.

It. Could. Not. Guess. Cut. 

Could. It. Guess. Not. Cut. 

Stanley. 

Stanley. 

It feels like a punch in the gut, and he almost doubles over again. 

Guess. Stanley. Could. Not. Cut. It. 

He feels like he’s going to vomit again, but this time with a fire alarm making a comeback in his head. 

He doesn’t know where to look. Beverly is crying, Eddie is yelling, Bill can’t tear his eyes away from the fortunes. Still, he doesn’t expect everyone’s attention to fully focus on the bowl of fortune cookies in the center when they start fucking shaking. 

Why.

Why.

Why is he here. 

Why is this happening. 

What the fuck is even happening??

The first fortune cookie that launches itself out of the bowl hatches a roach-wasp-baby head hybrid and Barry thinks maybe he’s dead. Then another fortune cookie hatches right fucking in front of him and an eyeball with all of its guts starts slithering toward him and that’s fuckin it. He may have been working on visualizing and imagining things in class but he’s definitely not this creative.

“Fuck!” he yells instinctively, backing up and almost tripping on his chair. “That fortune cookie’s looking at me!” He hears Eddie shrieking and looks up to see a wing with no body flying at Eddie and Ben in the corner across from him?? Ben is swatting at it but it’s so frantic he probably doesn’t even know where he’s swiping. “Eddie!” he yells out, but is rooted to his spot, unable to move anywhere but backwards.

A sizzling draws his attention back to the table and the fucking eyeball, to the bowl which somehow is now overfilling with some black ooze shit that’s burning everything it comes in contact with. Their fortunes, napkins, even the other things that hatched from the fucking bowl. 

Mike screams immediately followed by Bill cursing and bumping backwards into a potted plant. And there’s floating heads in the fishtanks and there’s shit flying around his head and the fucking eyeball is still making its way toward him and Barry doesn’t know when it happened, but his hand is in his waistband and there’s a familiar weight in his hand and he’s flipping the safety off and searching for a shot at something, anything. But there isn’t one that doesn’t have him possibly shooting one of his new acquaintances. 

The ringing in his head is getting louder and beginning to drown out the yelling as he focuses on a new mission. Trying to shoot the wing could hit Eddie or Ben. Trying to shoot the heads in the fish tank could hit Bill and also flood the entire restaurant. Whatever that fucked up thing in front of Beverly is is out of the question. He’s about to pull the trigger on the damn eyeball because he doesn’t think he can take it anymore when a chair lands on the center of the table, jolting everything on the table and Barry out of his mission. 

“It’s not real!” Mike is chanting after every hit of the chair on the table, on the black ooze and the bowl of fucked up fortune cookies and the eyeball and all of their glasses. “It’s not real! It’s not real!” 

“Is everything alright?”

Barry’s head snaps to the front of the room, where the waitress is surprisingly calm for whatever the fuck she just walked into. He looks back to the table, ooze and monsters gone, glass shattered everywhere, and quickly shoves his gun behind his back hoping to god none of them saw it. 

“Yeah,” he says to her, out of breath with a smile that isn’t comforting at all. “Can we get the check?” He does a lame little ‘check-please’ motion and hangs his head when she walks away, wide-eyed and probably scared for her life. He doesn’t blame her. They’re all scared for their lives, and frozen to their spot for a few minutes before she gets back. 

Ben sheepishly jumps forward when she does, trying to clean up some of the glass on the table, apologizing profusely. Mike does the same, putting the chair that he used to attack the table down separately since it’s now very damaged. He apologizes again and says he’ll pay for all the damages as they rush out and leaves his information with the waitress. 

“That’s what Pennywise does right, he fucks with us,” Eddie tries to reason on their way to the door. “So Stan is probably fine.”

What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Did shit like that used to happen all the time??

“Hey Mike,” Beverly’s voice is still a little shaky, though she hides it well. “Do you have Stan’s number?”

Barry is on high alert as Mike recites the number to Beverly. His eyes are darting around and his hand is ready to draw his gun again at any moment. There’s a boy that stares as they go, and he has to talk himself down internally from fighting this child. 

Outside Beverly puts her phone on speaker as Eddie paces like there’s no tomorrow. Beverly introduces herself to the person on the other side of the phone as Eddie finally decides what to do. 

“You lied to us,” he jabs a finger in front of Mike’s face. “That’s not okay. The first words out of your mouth should’ve been like- like hey, you wanna come to Derry and get fucking murdered?! Cause then I would’ve said no!” 

Eddie’s right in front of Barry and surprises him.  _ Murdered?? _ What the fuck is it that these guys are remembering that he doesn’t? Eddie continues pacing and it doesn’t do anything for Barry’s nerves. 

“Guys,” Ben whispers, scolding them and nodding toward the phone. 

“Oh,” a woman’s voice who definitely doesn’t sound like a Stanley sounds on the brink of tears. “He- he passed.”

It’s very faint in his ears from the distance between him and the phone, but it doesn’t process for a moment. Until it does. And his heart feels like it gained ten pounds. His chest is being pulled toward the ground, like gravity has decided now would be a good time to prove it exists. His lungs can feel its effects too, he realizes when taking a deep breath suddenly feels like more effort than it should be. 

“When did it happen?” Beverly asks, and he wonders how she can even speak. 

“Yesterday,” the voice comes back, and it weighs him down even more. “It was horrible, the way he died. His wrists.”

Even releasing the breath that got into his lungs feels difficult.

“In the bathtub,” Beverly mumbles.

“In the bathtub,” the woman over the phone says. 

If Barry weren’t experiencing something that suspiciously reminds him of how he felt during his peak of depression, he may have thought that was weird. But he didn’t, because he was feeling- what? What was that? Grief? Grief. Grief for someone he doesn’t even remember. Grief for someone none of them remembered until a couple hours ago. Grief for someone who- who… who invited him to his bar mitzvah.

What?

Why does Barry know what a bar mitzvah looks like? He’s not Jewish. As far as he knows, none of his friends are. 

But he distinctly remembers a boy with curly brown hair stuffed under a yarmulke, grinning at him from ear to ear, shoving him playfully, and feeling like he, even though Barry is definitely not Jewish, belonged there. 

And it only makes him feel heavier. 

“We’re all very sorry, Patty,” Beverly says into the phone. There’s a faint ‘ _ thank you’ _ and the connection is lost. Much like Barry’s sense of reality is starting to feel like.

“Stanley,” Eddie is waving his hands frantically and it brings him back to the moment. “Pennywise knew. He knew before we did.”

“We have to stop him,” Mike nods confidently and taps his notebook in his hand. “I have a plan.”

“I have a plan,” Barry finally speaks up. “Getting the fuck out of here.”

Eddie looks at Mike but points at Barry in agreement. 

“We made a promise to each other,” Mike objects. 

“A promise I can’t even remember!” Barry yells. 

“Barry, other people are gonna die,” Ben tells him solemnly. 

“Other people die every day man!” He should know. “I came here to get away from the murdering and people trying to murder me! I don’t know about you guys but I don’t owe this town shit! I can’t even remember growing up here so I don’t know what to tell you about whoever the fuck Pennywise is and whatever bullshit just happened in there. Fuck this! I’m fucking leaving.”

“People are trying to murder you?” he hears Eddie mumble next to him, but doesn’t respond as he makes his way around the parking lot. Fuck. He left his car at the library didn’t he. “Fuck!”

“Sorry man,” Eddie says behind him. “I’m with Rich- Barry.” 

“Eddie,” Mike begs. “Please.”

“Listen, what? We stay, we die, that’s it? I’m gonna go to the inn, I’m gonna pack up my shit, and i’m gonna drive home. I’m sorry man. Good luck.”

Barry feels like a fucking idiot but he’s not stopping walking away. He doesn’t remember exactly where the library is but he’ll figure it out. He’s got google maps. 

He hears Mike begging Eddie to wait and come back in the distance, then a car engine starting and peeling out of its parking space soon after. He isn’t even out of the parking lot before a car pulls up next to him. The window rolls down. 

“Where’s your car?” Eddie leans out the window, leaving his hands ten and two. 

Barry cringes at himself. “I sort of… left it at the library…”

“Jesus, you walked all the way here from the library?”

Barry’s defensive again. “I was kind of going through a crisis, Eds.”

There’s a deep frown on Eddie’s face that gets deeper. There’s a pause where Barry considers starting to walk again. 

“Get in the car, Trashmouth,” Eddie demands. “And don’t call me that.”

Barry frowns. “What, Eds?”

“Yeah asshole,” Eddie starts up again. “Richie used to call me that all the fucking time and I hated it so I’m not taking it from some guy who doesn’t even remember if he’s Richie or not. Are you getting in the car or what?”

Barry hesitates but gets in. When Eddie doesn’t move he looks at him and Eddie is staring at him, waiting. 

“Are you gonna put on your seat belt or are you going to fly through the windshield when we get in a car crash?”

“ _ When _ ?” Barry asks, suddenly unsure about being in the car with him and buckling his seat belt. 

“I’m a fucking risk analyst, Barry. There’s fucking risks.”

Eddie takes off as soon as he hears the click and yeah, with the speed he’s going and the lack of enough streetlights, there are risks. 

“And now I’ve got to reanalyze now that I know you’ve got a goddamn gun,” Eddie growls through his teeth. Oh shit.

“I was hoping no one saw that,” Barry comments sheepishly. 

“Saw you pull out a fucking gun?” Eddie looks straight at him and Barry suddenly remembers that Eddie had said he crashed his car when Mike called. 

“There was a lot of shit going on!”

“It’s a fucking gun, Barry!” His eyes are back on the road but it doesn’t ease up Barry’s stress about crashing while they argue. “That’s something people notice!”

“There was something flying around and heads in the fish tank and an eyeball crawling toward me!  _ That’s _ what I noticed. Do you even know where you’re going?”

“I know where I’m going!” Eddie argues. “Why do you even have a gun anyway?”

Barry steals his face into neutrality. “It’s for work.”

“Work??” Eddie glances at him and he knows he doesn’t believe him. “Work as an actor or work as in auto parts?”

“Hey! Working in auto parts can be dangerous!”

“Dangerous enough to need a gun?!”

He sees the library in the distance and thanks god for one saving grace tonight. 

“Yeah, maybe!” 

“Why don’t you just tell me why you have a gun??” 

“Because it’s none of your business!” Barry yells, and it shuts Eddie up. 

“Whatever, Trashmouth.”

“Stop calling me that,” Barry says, cross both between the conversation and that Eddie just told him to stop calling him a normal nickname, but keeps calling him whatever the fuck that is. “I don’t even know what that means.”

Eddie is silent for a moment as he pulls into the lot of the library. There’s only one car there. 

“It’s what we used to call him, when we were kids,” Eddie pulls up beside his rental. “It was sort of affectionate and very accurate.” 

Barry doesn’t say anything. Accurate, huh? He opens his door and steps out. 

“I hope you are him, by the way,” Eddie calls to him right before he closes the door. “Richie.”

Barry considers him. “Yeah,” he nods. “Thanks for the ride.”

Eddie nods back and he shuts the door, turning toward his own car. He sees Eddie’s headlights pull away when he’s in, and knocks his head against the wheel. 

Fuck. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Lets be real, Richie was 80% of the humor of the reunion.  
> 2) Stan is absoLUTELY a trigger for Barry.  
> 3) It was surprisingly difficult to remember to type Barry and not Richie.  
> 4) Is this too movie descriptive? I don't want it to be too descriptive but I also want it to read so that you don't have to think too hard about remembering what happened.


	5. Come back and we’ll see if you remember how to be children. secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark - IT, by Stephen King, chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing about this night has been what they were expecting, but hell if they're going to waste it.

Despite sitting in his car, slamming his palms on the wheel, and screaming, Barry made it back to the inn at the same time as Ben, Beverly, and Eddie. It was probably the speeding. And the screaming and slamming his hands on the wheel while speeding which seemed like an okay decision at the time. 

They push their way in through the front doors, and Barry can still see Eddie fuming lightly in front of him. 

“Let’s get our shit and get the fuck out of here,” Eddie says, already making his way up the stairs. He also directs a question to Ben that he doesn’t pay attention to. He’s hot on Eddie’s heels on the way up to his room, and isn’t paying attention if Eddie is rambling off something to him or at him or around him. Honestly chances are he’s talking to himself. All he can hear is screaming in his head backed by white noise, and all he wants to do is punch something. 

His fists are clenched at his sides when he finally slams the door to his room and he feels no desire to unclench them. He can’t believe he had the audacity to believe that he was getting away from his already fucked up life. From a phone call with a stranger! Now adding to the list of people who want to kill him is some fucked up magic clown bullshit and an identity crisis. Fucking christ. He should’ve stayed in LA and let the Chechens kill him. Or try to, at least. Again. 

He starts throwing shit into his bag. He didn’t really unpack anyway so it’s fine. He never folded his clothes either when traveling. It’s a mess but who the fuck cares. He’s getting the fuck out. That’s what matters. 

He pulls out his phone to see if he can book a flight and curses at a 3% battery. He  _ just  _ charged it what the fuck.  _ And  _ his charger was the first thing he threw into his backpack. 

Do you know how when you’re angry and the tiniest thing doesn’t go your way you realize how thin the line you’re walking is? That’s what happens. His charger is towards the bottom of his bag, and when he pulls it gets tangled in something. Everything. So he yells and he yanks and he cries in frustration when everything he just shoved in comes tumbling out and he’s so aggravated he just starts throwing things. And it almost makes him feel better. 

He throws the charger and the shirt that’s tangled into it. He throws his small toiletry bag and it makes a satisfying thump against the wall. He grabs his whole bag and slams it against the bed as hard as he can, more things tumbling out, then throws it at the opposite wall. It almost seems cathartic for a moment. 

That’s when something heavy falls out of his bag. Something he’d forgotten he put in there. The loud thump provokes a voice from the opposite side of the wall the sounds suspiciously like Eddie yelling ‘just fucking pack, Barry!’ which he ignores. Instead he moves over to the wall, breathing heavy, and picks up the book. Mr. Cousineau’s smile stares back at him. Taunting him. 

He can’t go back to LA. But he needs to know that Mr. Cousineau is okay. Or relatively okay. He needs to protect him from Fuches- fucking Fuches- and for his son Leo to call him back. But he can’t go back to LA. Not yet. He really dug himself into a hole, didn’t he? 

He debates calling Mr. Cousineau’s phone again. Maybe Leo will pick up again. Maybe Mr. Cousineau will, that’d be nice. But then he looks at his phone and is reminded of his 3% battery life. 

Fuck it. He’ll charge it in the car. He’ll just drive and figure it out from there. He can go anywhere. 

He throws everything back into his bag except his charger, which he shoves into his pocket, then swings his bag over his shoulder and shoves out of his room and storms down the stairs. 

Does he need to check out with the receptionist? Fuck is there even a receptionist at this time of night?

He makes his way into the lobby, doesn’t see a receptionist and rolls his eyes. Whatever. At least he doesn’t have to interact with that weird ass old man from earlier, though it feels like days ago. He spots Ben and Beverly at the bar, looking like they definitely haven’t gathered their things and having a deep conversation. He wants to go over there and ask them why the hell they aren’t ready to go. 

Not his business, he decides. He doesn’t know them, they’re leaving, it doesn’t matter. 

But even as he’s thinking it, he yells up the stairs, “Eddie let’s go!” 

He blinks. Then shakes his head. What is he waiting for Eddie for? It’s not like they’re leaving together. He doesn’t even know where he’s going. So he spins on his heel and walks toward the bar, feeling obligated to at least say goodbye. 

He hates obligations. Even more so when he overhears Beverly tell Ben, “I’ve seen all of us die.”

If there was one thing Barry did not want to hear it was that. Well, amongst other things. 

Eddie comes clobbering down the stairs with a giant black suitcase in each hand and Barry is momentarily distracted by the sheer ridiculousness. How much stuff does one of the smallest people he’s ever met need on a trip? And he’s talking about grabbing his toiletry bag? That’s not in the packed suitcases that are half his size?? 

Barry’s looking at him bewildered, but he guesses it comes off different to Eddie because he asks, “What did I miss?” And Barry gets blown back into the moment against his will. 

It’s a moment he doesn’t want to be in, but he doesn’t have a choice anymore, does he? She knew how Stanley was going to die, and it makes his chest burn. He doesn’t know if he’s angry, or if he’s devastated, or if he even believes it at all. How? 

It’s the only thing that keeps him there, sits them down in the lounge area of the bar, watching Eddie pace and a tear roll down Beverly’s cheek in front of him. 

“Okay,” Eddie stops pacing to chop his hand in the air as he directs his question, a tendency Barry is noticing he does when he’s stressed. “What do you mean you’ve seen us all die?”

“Every night since Derry,” Beverly shakes as she speaks. “I’ve been having these nightmares.”

Barry can’t stop his internal commentary. Nightmares. Nightmares? We're making decisions on nightmares? Nightmares that.... knew how Stanley was going to die?

“People in pain, people dying, people-” a gasping breath shakes through her. 

“So you have nightmares,” Eddie shrugs a tense shrug, his voice going higher and lower together. “People have nightmares. I have nightmares. But that doesn’t mean your visions are true.”

Barry nods to himself. Fucking amen to that. The only dreams he ever remembers are nightmares of people dying. 

Beverly shakes her head. She hasn’t looked at anyone since she sat down. “I’ve seen every single one of us-” 

Barry sees how hard she’s trying to hold back her tears and her fears, and he feels for her. Empathy floods into him for a split second, before she makes direct eye contact with him and his blood runs cold. 

“Every single one of us…” she says again, looking into his eyes. It sends a shiver down his spine and he doesn’t like it. 

No.

“I’ve seen...” she whispers trailing off, still trapped in his gaze. 

Fuck no.

“You’ve seen every single one of us, what?” 

The new voice startles Barry, and he jumps, instinctively reaching toward his waistband. He doesn’t notice Eddie shoot him a glare. 

Bill rounds the corner with Mike in tow, and he looks worse for wear. The both of them really, but Bill is covered in a sheen of sweat that he’s pretty sure wasn’t there before, and his hair is a mess. 

“To the place where Stanley wound up,” Beverly whispers as Bill sits on the armrest of the couch next to her. It’s barely audible, but Barry hears it like it’s whispered into his own ears, just as well as he feels the temperature in the room drop even though there are two additional bodies there now. “That’s how we end.”

That’s how we end. 

The place where Stanley wound up. 

Hearing it phrased in a way to avoid outright telling them about their own deaths makes something in Barry’s head click. Not in understanding, in that he is going to lose his mind if things don’t start making any fucking sense. If he really is Richie he better start remembering shit right fucking now. 

He feels himself start to fume in frustration and he doesn’t register himself flexing his fingers around his gun still in his waistband, even though he knows that Bill isn’t a threat. Until Eddie barks at him, that is. 

“Knock it off,” Eddie growls with a finger pointed in his face, and Barry relaxes his hand mostly in surprise. When he lowers his arm to his side Eddie turns back to the group. “Okay why aren’t we seeing any of that shit? Huh? What makes her so special?”

Bill is already back up and pacing slightly when Mike says, “The Deadlights.” He freezes and repeats it. 

“The Deadlights,” and it’s like a lightbulb goes on across the room. Three bright, shining light bulbs rotating around each other that none of them want to acknowledge, but Bill says it anyway. “She was the only one of us that got caught in the Deadlights that day.”

Barry squeezes his eyes shut. “Please stop saying ‘the Deadlights,’” he whispers even though he’s pretty sure it wasn’t loud enough for anyone to actually hear. He doesn’t know exactly what the Deadlights are, but he knows that it sends a cold shiver down his spine and makes him just a little bit nauseous. 

When he opens his eyes Beverly has a cigarette between her lips and Mike is already on another rant. About what? Barry honestly couldn’t tell you. This clown spirit thing that “touched them” when they were kids. “Changed. Like an infection, or a virus,” and Barry doesn’t like the sound of any of it. Especially not like that. And god, what the fuck does metastasizing mean? He doesn’t work in a fucking library, Mike. Then Mike says “it just got to Stan first because- '' and Barry word vomits. 

“Because he was the weakest.”

It was like a reflex. Like a fact that he knew because he was his best friend. Because he knew them all well enough to evaluate and joke around about it. Like it was a normal coping mechanism for him to make sour jokes and make everyone around the room groan at him. 

“Jesus Christ, Rich,” Bill groans, the  _ what-the-fuck _ is implied. Barry doesn’t notice the slip up until a look of horror crosses Bill’s face. “Oh, fuck. Sorry Barry.”

Barry blinks, then shakes his head. “No, uh- that… that was uncalled for. I don’t know where that came from. Sorry.”

Beverly looks a cross between scolding and surprised. Ben looks at him with a hopeful look in his eyes. Mike nods at him, Barry frowns at the action, still upset with him, but Mike powers through. 

“What Beverly sees,” he says pointing a finger not a single one of them appreciates. “It will come to pass. It’s what’ll happen to all of us eventually. Unless we stop it.”

“And how the hell are we supposed to do that?” Eddie challenges, and Barry wishes he didn’t ask.

“The Ritual of Chud,” Mike has gone level. There’s a change in his voice of certainty, of determination that wasn’t there before, and Barry thinks he knows he has them all hooked. That they all know they have to stay. That they know that they have to kill it. No matter what. “The Shokopiwah. The first ones who fought it. They have a saying. ‘All living things must abide by laws of the shape they inhabit.’”

“Hang on, a tribal ritual?” Barry cuts in. He’s getting more and more aggravated and it’s coming through. “Are you serious? Come on there’s gotta be another way. This thing comes back, what? Every 27 years? Let’s just fuckin kick the can and do it then. Maybe I’ll remember who the fuck I am by then.”

Mike looks torn between fucking giddy and devastated, and Barry realizes he just admitted into thinking yeah, he’s most likely Richie maybe. And he’s with them in this. But the bottom line is he’s not happy about it and he’s still upset. So as long as that’s also coming across too he stands by it. 

“Wait,” Eddie is shaking his head. “We’ll be 70 years old in 27 years.”

Barry shoots him a glare before Beverly shakes her head, tragedy in her eyes. “It doesn’t work that way,” she shakes her head. She doesn’t stop shaking her head, even when Bill moves over to her and wraps an arm around her shoulders. “None of us make it another 27 years. And the way it happens...” Her breathing goes heavy and it’s not comforting to their imaginations.

Jesus fucking Christ. Well, to be honest, in his line of work he wasn’t exactly expecting to get to live into old age, but to be told flat out like that is not comforting. He needs something to support him. He can’t sit because his anxiety won’t let him sit still, but he can’t just stand here. He moves behind the bar, breaking eye contact with her, and leans his elbows on the bar brought down by dread. 

“So if we don’t beat it this cycle,” Ben reluctantly concludes for them. “Then…”

“We all die,” Bill finishes for him. 

Barry spots two shots set on the bar untouched. He doesn’t know what it is and he doesn’t bother to smell it to find out. He just downs one of them and lets it burn his throat. 

“Horribly,” Eddie adds. 

“Okay,” Ben says, his tone saying  _ ‘fucking really, Eddie?’  _

“I didn’t say it,” Eddie defends. “She said it. Not me.”

“It’s not helpful.”

Eddie makes a noise of disagreement but puts his hands up, and Ben turns away.

“Alright, guys look,” Bill says, and Barry’s never been more sure that Bill was and has always been their leader. “I’ve seen w- wh- wh- what he’s talking about and it-” He sounds like he doesn’t want him to be saying it either. “It’s all t-true. It’s the only way. If we want this ritual to work...”

“We have to remember,” Mike finishes for him, and Barry resists the urge to roll his eyes. 

“Remember what?” Ben asks. 

Mike looks at him and takes his sweetest fucking time to say, “Everything.” 

The word echoes in the small room. Everyone had been remembering things they didn’t know they forgot all night, Barry included. How much more, what else, and how scarring could the rest of what they need to remember be? For Barry apparently, his entire fucking life. 

No one responds, but a feeling of vague, reluctant acceptance waves through the room that they can all feel. Mike looks around at devastated faces. Beverly, tears still making their way down her face, Bill’s one of plotting something he doesn’t want to plot, Ben looking at Beverly, eyes full of concern both for her and for everything else, Eddie, still pacing and mouthing something to himself, and Barry. Barry is internally combusting. He’s almost refusing to allow himself to accept it, but he knows he already has. He’s in this now, and he didn’t want any part of it. 

The second shot is picked up and thrown back, and heads turn his way, some relief of tension between all of them. It cuts through with a chuckle from Ben and Mike accepts it as confirmation from all of them. 

“Get some rest,” he tells them. “We start at dawn.”

“Yeah good fuckin luck,” Eddie mumbles as Mike makes his way out. He turns back before he rounds the corner.

“Please, do try and get some sleep. Seriously,” he has to clarify. “I care about you all and I just want us to win. And I want you to remember us, and each other.” He looks around the room, at each and every person. “I missed you guys.”

They nod back, mumbling ‘good-night’s and weak smiles. Mike returns the favor and exits the inn, hoping to give them as much time to rest as possible. He missed them a lot. He just hopes that they don’t regret remembering each other. 

The bar of the inn sits in silence. This is not the night they had in mind. 

After a moment, Beverly gets up, cigarette stubbed out into the ashtray on the side table beside her. “Well,” she says wiping her hands on her jeans without making eye contact with anyone. “I’m going to go to bed.”

Bill and Ben both perk up. Bill speaks first. 

“Are you staying?” he asks hopefully.

Beverly hesitates, still not looking at him. She turns as if looking for something, but Barry’s pretty sure she’s stalling. She picks up her bag she rested on the chair, then takes a deep breath. 

“Yes,” she nods, though she seems like she’s telling herself, not Bill. “Yeah. I’m staying.”

Bill nods, and gives her a small smile that she doesn’t see. 

“And anyone else staying should get some sleep too,” she continues, then turns toward the stairs. 

Ben jumps up almost immediately, watching her go. He turns to the rest of them and nods. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then he goes to catch up with Beverly. 

Bill rubs a hand across his face, the stress of the past few hours catching up with him. So much has happened in such a short amount of time, and whatever drug-root Mike gave him probably isn’t helping. He moves his hand from his face to his head, raking it through his hair. 

“Will I see you tomorrow?” he asks, defeated. 

Eddie is making a face, like he’s still fighting himself over it. His arms cross, uncross, his hands go into his pockets, and when he finally gives up, he throws them into the air and drops them to his side. “Yeah,” he tells him reluctantly. “See you tomorrow.”

Bill nods at Eddie and turns to Barry. He wants to say he’s fighting as much as Eddie is, but he needs to know. He needs to know who this Richie guy was, who he is, even if it means fighting some immortal murder clown deity. Barry nods once. Bill nods again. 

“Good night.”

“Night,” they both echo, and Bill is gone. 

Eddie takes the deepest breath physically possible. “Fuck,” he breathes out, the word calming his nerves more than the breath did. “Fucking Christ.” He shakes his head like that’ll clear anything up. “Jesus.” Barry can relate. 

Eddie spots his luggage, still sitting peacefully at the bottom of the stairs. “Fuck,” he says again. “I guess I better take all my shit back upstairs then, huh?”

Barry blinks at him, not following, then follows his gaze. “Do you need a hand?”

Eddie is already making his way toward the bags, and Barry follows, grabbing his own on the way there. 

“No I got it,” Eddie snaps at him. He backs off, but almost immediately Eddie apologizes. “Sorry,” he mumbles, only half turning his head back to where Barry is following him up the stairs. Barry doesn’t respond. He gets it. 

When they get to the top of the stairs, Eddie pushes his half-his-size-bags to his door and fumbles for keys. Barry moves behind him to get past when Eddie says, “So you’re going to stay?” Barry looks back. Eddie isn’t looking at him. He has his key in his hand, but he looks like he’s stalling. 

“Yeah,” Barry nods even though he knows Eddie won’t see it. “I guess I am.”

Eddie nods too. “Cool,” he says before looking up and sticking out his hand palm up. “Give me your phone.”

Barry’s eyebrows scrunch. “Excuse me?”

“You should have at least one of our numbers if we’re all going to be risking our lives in a town that wants to kill us,” Eddie frowns, making impatient grabby hands. “Not that I want any of us to split up but whatever.”

Barry cautiously takes his phone out of his pocket, unlocks it, and puts it in Eddie's waiting hand, which immediately grabs it and brings it close to his face. 

“Jesus, Barry,” he scolds immediately. “You’re at 2%, you heathen. Why didn’t you charge your phone?”

Barry shrugs defensively. “I was gonna charge it in the car. I was a little more focused on getting the fuck out.”

He can basically feel Eddie rolling his eyes as he taps away on his phone. 

“Whatever,” Eddie finishes putting in his contact information. “Now if you do try and skip out I can find you and end you.”

Barry’s face falls. “Great,” he says, monotone. “Thanks for that.”

Eddie holds out his phone to return to him with a smirk. “Welcome to the Loser’s Club, Barry.”

Barry takes his phone returning it with a sarcastic smile. “Hey thanks for the warm welcome.”

“Oh, yeah,” Eddie returns, equally as sarcastic. “It was a pleasure. Super fun.”

Barry shakes his head and outwardly rolls his eyes at him. He gives him a small smile. “Good night, Eddie.”

“Night Barry,” Eddie smiles back. He sticks his key into his lock and opens up his door, looking up one more time to see Barry at the room next to him. He goes inside and immediately turns on every light in the room. 

~~

It’s been, maybe an hour and a half? Maybe less? Maybe more? Who knows, but surprise surprise, Barry can’t sleep. The entire night is on repeat over and over in his head, what he can comprehend from it at least. He knows he can’t and won’t be able to make heads or tails of it no matter how hard he tries, but his stupid brain won’t let. him. rest. 

He doesn’t even know what time it is, he just knows that it’s dark and every sound in the old inn, inside and outside, pushes him a little bit closer toward an edge he doesn’t know how far he is from. The old building creaks and whines, maybe from wind, maybe just from age. Barry is maybe finally just about to be able to tune it out when a louder, more distinct creak shudders his eardrums. 

His body freezes. There’s three soft thumps that could be from outside, but very possibly may be coming from the hallway. A moment passes, and Barry almost lets it go. 

Then there are more creaks. Two this time, followed again by three soft thumps. 

Barry sits up in his bed as silently as he can, which is partially ruined by the creaking of the bed frame. He moves toward his bag as another set of creaks is accompanied by three soft thumps. Louder. His hand wraps around his gun and he pulls it out slowly, as the creaks become louder, closer. 

There’s three thumps on his door. Someone is knocking. 

He clicks the safety off and takes a quiet step toward the door. The floorboard whines quietly and Barry glares down where he can barely see. He takes another step. 

There’s a voice.

“Barry?” it whispers. 

Is that...?

“You guys he’s probably asleep,” someone else whispers. 

Eddie?

“Well we should still wait and see. It’s been like 10 seconds Eddie, what if he is awake?”

For Christ’s sake, Barry lets out all of the breath he’d been holding in anticipation and drops the gun back into his bag, zipping it up and shoving it under the bed. 

He swings open the door to see Beverly with her fist raised to knock again, Ben, Bill, and Eddie crowded in the small hallway behind her. She smiles sheepishly. 

“Jesus Christ you guys,” Barry whisper-yells. “You nearly gave me a panic attack.”

Bill smiles apologetically and rubs the back of his neck. Ben whispers back, “Sorry man.”

“We were just thinking,” Beverly starts, looking back at their little group. “Well, none of us could really sleep tonight,” she looks back at Barry. “We thought maybe we could stick together? Safety in numbers, right?”

Barry looks at her, face blank, then turns to the rest of them. Their faces half expectant, waiting for an answer. He blinks.

“Are we about to have a sleepover?”

Beverly beams at him. Bill lets out a surprised laugh and immediately slaps his hand over his mouth, trying not to make noise. 

“I doubt there’s anyone else staying here,” Eddie tells him, though he’s whispering too. 

“So,” Beverly claps once. “Who has the biggest room?”

“Not me,” Eddie shakes his head. 

“I think they’re probably all about the same size,” Ben suggests.

“I’ve got a queen size and an armchair,” Bill tries. 

“I have the same,” Beverly nods. 

“This is mine,” Barry mumbles, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. 

“Let’s go to mine,” Beverly suggests. “I’ve got some snacks in there too.” They mumble and shrug in agreement, and it’s decided. “Barry,” she turns back to him. “Would you mind bringing your blankets too?”

“Sure,” he says heading back into his room. “I’ll meet you guys.”

He pulls his phone from its charger, now at 87%, and tries to shove it into his pocket. When he can’t, he looks down and realizes in horror that they just had that whole conversation while in his boxers. Not that anyone mentioned it. Oh well. It’s not like he brought any sleep pants with him anyway. They all already saw him. It’s fine.

He pulls up his blankets and rolls them up into a ball in his arms. He decides against bringing a gun, just in case as a reason for both sides of the argument. He does, as a second thought, grab a pillow. 

As he exits and locks his door he spots Eddie do the same, except his blanket is half folded over an arm instead of balled up and barely able to see around it like Barry is. He turns to the left where the rest of the rooms are and spots two open doors. He heads towards those, peeking into Beverly’s room on the first try. 

Ben is already in there, both of them sitting cross-legged on the bed, sharing a bag of pork rinds.

“Barry!” Beverly smiles invitingly and nods for him to come in. Barry smiles and enters the room. The tv is on mute, sending flashing lights of color across the room, calming the nerve of moving shadows that aren’t there. Eddie follows closely behind him, dropping his blanket and pillow on the armchair. 

“All that processed shit’ll kill you,” he tells them as he reaches between them into the bag. 

“I’m here for a good time, not a long time,” Beverly tells him, popping another into her mouth and grinning at him. Ben laughs next to her and Eddie shakes his head good naturedly as he chews on his own piece. She pulls out a bag of M&M’s and says to Barry, “Come join us!”

Barry puts his balled up blanket and pillow down on the floor next to the bed, then sits on the edge of the mattress and takes some candy. 

“Where’s Big Bill?” Ben asks and is answered almost immediately.

“Big Bill,” Bill’s voice comes from the door and Barry turns around. “has arrived.” 

Bill’s blanket is draped over his head, wrapped around his body, and he flaps his arms to make it move like a cape or wings. He hears Beverly laugh at the sight and Barry himself wears an entertained smile. He already feels less stressed, and maybe even a little sleepy. 

In one hand, Bill has a bag of beef jerky that he offers to them, Ben and Beverly accept a piece. In the other he holds a flashlight. 

“What are we gonna need a flashlight for?” Eddie asks. “Aren’t we supposed to be sleeping?”

Bill shrugs. “Come on, Eds.” Barry subconsciously notes the use of the nickname. “It’s not really a sleepover without a flashlight.” he says clicking it on and off a few times in Eddie’s face.

“Alright alright,” Eddie objects, waving a hand in front of his face to tell Bill to stop. “I don’t know how accurate that is but sure.”

Ben laughs at the sight, then watches Bill plop down onto the floor, blanket making a nest around him. He looks around at everyone, smiling and laughing. Together. And it feels like they’re kids again. Like they never left and forgot each other for 27 years. What he wouldn’t give to be a carefree kid again, with six ride-or-die best friends. What he wouldn’t give to be happy again. He’s so glad that he’s here. With them. Even under the circumstances. 

“Okay seriously, though,” Eddie interrupts his revelation. “Where are we sleeping, cause there's no way I'm laying down on this carpet that probably hasn’t been cleaned in the past 80 years.”

“Eddie,” Beverly already has a grin on her face. “How much would it take for you to lay face-down on the carpet?”

“A million bucks,” he responds immediately. “No fucking way.”

“Eddie I’ll give you a million bucks if you lay down on the carpet,” Bill immediately chimes in. 

Eddie’s head snaps to him. “No way!”

“You said a million bucks Eds,” Beverly laughs. “You gotta do it!”

“There’s no way I’m laying on the fuckin floor, Bev, that’s so gross. Have you ever heard of-”

Eddie goes on a spiel of a thousand different bacteria and sicknesses you can catch from laying on old dirty carpet and they entertain it. They mess around for a bit until Bill passes out in the armchair, and Ben covers him with his blanket that he lost somewhere in the night. Eventually they find themselves situated with Beverly and Eddie on the bed, and Ben laying next to Barry on top of two blankets acting as a cushion between them and the floor. 

“Barry,” he whispers into the dark room that’s gone quiet. Barry hums lightly in response. At the confirmation that he’s awake, he turns toward him slightly. “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?”

In the pale moonlight, a million thoughts seem to cross Barry’s face. 

“Besides coming here,” Ben mends jokingly, hoping to relieve the small bit of tension that Ben accidentally put on him. It seems to have worked when Barry huffs a laugh.

“Probably joining acting class,” he responds in a whisper. “It was one of the most impulsive things I’ve ever done. And also probably the best decision I‘ve made.”

“Are you gonna be working on anything cool when you get back?” he asks. 

Barry shrugs underneath the blanket. “Probably just try and fix things with my girlfriend. I didn’t exactly leave on the best terms,” he confesses into the night. “If I go back,” he adds in a mumble.

“What would you do if you didn’t go back?”

“I don’t know,” Barry makes a face he can barely see. “I didn’t really leave on good terms with anyone. Like, bad terms, really. And now all of this?” he gestures vaguely toward the ceiling. “I don’t know.”

Ben nods. “How are you doing with all this, by the way?”

Barry shakes his head. “I’m trying to remember you. I want to remember you. Or anything, really. I just- I don’t know if I can.”

“Do you…” Ben stops. He doesn’t know any other way to ask this. “Do you think you’re Richie?”

Barry is silent for a moment, but Ben knows he hasn’t fallen asleep. 

“I think I might be,” he answers eventually. “Somehow. Only in my god awful luck would I have amnesia not once, not twice, but three times in my life. Like what are the chances of that ever happening? That’s so fucked up.

“And yeah, okay, maybe the first amnesia was because of leaving this godforsaken town, but the other two? Ben, I can’t even remember my parents. I can’t remember friends or jobs or life. The way you guys talk about Richie sounds like he would have lived his life to the fullest. But Barry Berkman? He definitely doesn’t live his life like that.”

Barry stops for a breath, and Ben feels for him. He can’t imagine the pain that he’s going through. 

“I want to be him. And I think I am him because, well, Stan really. I know things there would be no reason for me to know. But i just- I just don’t know anything else. That’s so fucked up. This whole thing is pretty fucked up. Plus like who the hell- going off of Mike’s theory- who the fuck would take a random person who doesn’t remember a single thing about his life and just claim him? And I believed him?? What the fuck man.”

Ben is suddenly desperate for anything to say to ease his anxieties. “Well, all things considered,” is what he goes for, immediately regretting it. “Is that the  _ weirdest _ thing that’s happened to us in the past 24 hours?”

Barry snorts but doesn’t answer, and Ben fears that might have made it worse. He turns to him. 

“Would it help at all if I told you about Richie? About who he was- who you were when we were kids?” 

Barry doesn’t answer for a moment. 

“It’ll be like a bedtime story,” Ben tries, and he receives a half smile. 

“Sure,” Barry agrees. “Thanks, Haystack.”

“Haystack,” Ben repeats with a grin, he ignores the slight frown that crosses onto Barry’s face. “That’s good. Richie, you, used to call me that. He nicknamed everyone, even himself. I was named after Haystack Calhoun, who was-”

“An overweight wrestler,” Barry finishes for him. 

“That’s the one,” Ben smiles. “I was pretty overweight myself when I was a kid. Richie’s nickname was Trashmouth, because he had no filter, and would swear like a sailor every chance he got. He got in trouble plenty from not being able to shut up when he needed to.”

Barry huffs a laugh, and Ben continues. He tells him the story of how they first met, of building dams in a river that got them yelled at by a police officer, of going to the one cinema in town at the time and sneaking into the scary movies, of playing in the Barrens, and having all the energy and imagination of kids in the 80’s with curfews and bullies. He tells him stories he only remembers as he continues, until his eyes are drooping and he hears Barry’s breathing even out. Then he drifts off into sleep with a cloud of childhood melancholy. 

When he wakes up in the middle of the night to Barry in grief, in pain, crying in his sleep, tossing and turning, Beverly is there, squeezing herself in between the laid out blankets, holding Barry from the opposite side of Ben. He moves closer to them, an anchoring weight on his other side, and they hold him until he calms down, and they both return to the pull of sleep. 

~~

Monroe Fuches has a missed call. He has a bunch of missed calls, actually. Intentionally missed, and most of them from one person: Barry Berkman. 

Sometimes he leaves voicemails, and usually he’ll listen to them. He actually hasn’t heard from Barry in a couple days, which is a nice change, but also suspicious. He seemed hell-bent on finding him when he shot up the goddamned monastery. A sacred place! How dare he! 

All of his friends and allies. Dead. 

So he listens to the voicemails. Just so he knows where Barry’s head is at. Usually they’re all about the same:  _ I’m gonna find you, you’re dead, how could you,  _ blah blah blah. 

But this one is different. 

There’s no yelling. He‘s not even talking. It’s silent on the other end. When he plays it again, he can make out the faint distinction of the crunching of leaves, then the message ends. It’s disconcerting. 

Fuches is up, pacing. What’s his plan? What’s he going to do next? Barry was always better at finding and tracking people. He needs to know what is going on in that brain of his. 

Oh. 

Fuches pulls out his laptop and waits impatiently for it to start. He had always paid Barry in cash. Partially because that’s what he was paid with, partially for the lack of a paper trail. But Barry had a bank account and got a credit card for emergencies. And it was Fuches’s business to know everything about Barry. After all, Barry had said it himself: he  _ is _ his business. So he knows Barry’s account information whether Barry is aware of it or not. 

And when he looks through his recent transactions, one sticks out. A plane ticket.

What the fuck is in Maine?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lighter chapter because the Losers deserve one night to be young dumb kids. To remember how to be young dumb kids. For a couple of hours at least.
> 
> Writing is hard.


	6. The exhilaration was hard to explain. It was a lonely, melancholy feeling. - IT, by Stephen King, chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Splitting up is a bad idea.

Barry dreams in vivid color. So vivid that he knows he’s dreaming. The content of the dreams though? He couldn’t tell you. There didn't seem to be any purpose at first, only the feeling of belonging. He dreams in visions, each one running over each other to try and catch his attention, but too many at once to absorb any of them. 

He sees flashes of deep green, a large body of water down below, and a streak of orange hair jumping down to meet it. He sees bursts of white, grins wide enough to tackle anything the world threw at them, together. He sees 8-bit blue and yellow, in video games he used to spend his summers playing. He sees brown hair, curls on the face of someone who he trusts with his entire life, for his entire life. He sees pink and red in the blinking lights of the cinema in town, flashes reflected in mischievous eyes of young Ben and Eddie as they sneak inside. He sees silver in his bike, and red from where he scraped his knees falling off. He sees childhood joy, friends, belonging. 

He sees yellow in the form of a raincoat. And grey in the water, pulling a shoe out in the tunnel. He only sees red balloons in his peripherals, and when he turns toward them they’re nowhere to be found. He spots a white face, far away from him, and glowing yellow eyes. He sees green in Eddie’s inhaler, and orange in his pill bottles that shake as he does when he sucks in the medication. He sees red as he watches himself throw rocks at a group of boys, red on someone’s stomach, bleeding out the letter H. Red in the blood on Stanley’s face, and in Beverly’s hair, too high up in the air to be normal. Red on the clown’s face, red in the clown’s smile, red in the balloons he holds. And a piercing yellow gaze, even though one of the eyes does not move to focus on him even as they get closer. He sees black. Lost in a maze of tunnels, his friends nowhere to be found. 

He jolts awake in a cold sweat, weighed down on both sides. He breathes heavily though he only vaguely remembers what he dreamed. Turning to each side, he sees Beverly with both of her arms wrapped around one of his, face pressed into his bicep. On the other is Ben, who turned onto his stomach in the night, his shoulder resting on top of Barry’s arm, blonde hair brushing against his cheek. 

He’s trapped. But for some reason, he’s kind of okay with it. 

He moves his arm trapped in Beverly’s grasp, but she only tightens her hold on him and repositions her head so her cheek rests on top of his arm. When he moves his other arm Ben has no reaction whatsoever, so he stays put. It’s still dark outside, the night skies just barely beginning to lighten through the window, and he feels his heart rate slowing down. He closes his eyes again and just breathes, letting the light tug of sleepiness get stronger within him. 

There’s a buzz from the table and he shoots up as far as he can with two people on top of him, and Bill jumps up wildly, looking dazed and ready to fight. Not well, but ready. His two companions grumble in protest at the movement, but when the buzz happens again they both shoot up, suddenly as aware as they can be for being dead asleep three seconds ago. Bill’s eyes follow the sound, still strongly on the defense, until he spots the source of the noise and deflates. Barry sits up, finally free, and watches Bill move to the table and pick up his cell phone. 

“Hi Mike,” he greets into the phone sleepily. Barry, Beverly, and Ben all fall back onto the makeshift bed and breathe a sigh of relief. 

“Now that’s what I call a wake-up call,” Ben comments. 

Beverly snorts to the other side of him and he lets out a soft laugh himself. Beverly stretches, arms above her head brushing Barry in the face as they go, back arching off the ground. She makes what can only be described as Her Stretching Noise, then drops back down to the ground, limp, and turns to him. 

“How’d you sleep?”

Barry blinks, honestly unsure if she’s talking to him. He drops his head toward her. 

“Uh, okay I guess.”

Beverly looks like she doesn’t believe him, but nods. “Good.”

“Hey uh, when’d you get over there?” he asks softly. “You were on the bed last I remember.”

Beverly shrugs and looks up to the ceiling, stretching her neck side to side. “I came over when I heard you dreaming.” Barry pales and looks away as she looks back at him. “Sounded like some intense stuff.”

Barry clears his throat and looks over to Ben, who is pointedly looking at his phone. He looks to the ceiling. “I don’t really remember much.” He twiddles his thumbs under the blankets. “Or, nothing that makes anything make sense, really.”

There’s silence for a moment, and Beverly lays her hand on his shoulder. When he looks over, she’s on her side, fully addressing him. “It’s okay, Barry. We’ll figure it out.”

It sends a wave of comfort through him, a feeling almost unfamiliar to him. He gives her a sideways smile and she gives him one right back. 

“Yeah,” Bill says, and they turn to him. He’s pinching the bridge of his nose. “Yeah we’ll be ready.” Bill hangs up and sighs, then moves toward the bed, shaking Eddie by the arm. “Eddie wake up.” He addresses the rest of the room, knowing the rest of them are awake. Eddie just groans and waves his hand. “Mike is gonna be here in half an hour. Come on,” he slaps Eddie’s arm. “We gotta get up.”

Eddie groans louder, more angrily, and pulls the blanket over his head as Ben, Beverly and Barry start to get up. They watch as Bill grabs something off the nightstand, yanks the blanket off of Eddie and shines his flashlight into his face. “Eddie wake up!”

“Just five more minutes, Myra,” Eddie whines, ducking his head into the pillow. 

Beverly lets out a giggle then slaps a hand over her mouth. The lights flip on, and he turns to see Ben standing at the switch with a small smirk on his face. Beverly beams at him and claps her hands close to his exposed ear. “Time to go Eds!” she announces loudly. 

Eddie flips over onto his back, taking the pillow with him so it’s still covering his face. “You guys are the worst,” he mumbles through it.

Barry laughs along with them, and realizes in his gut that it’s like they reverted back to their teenage selves, making fun of each other, giving each other as much shit as they can spew, their childish glee returning to them in bursts. 

Ben drums his hands on Eddie’s stomach and Eddie, not expecting it, flinches and groans. “All right fuckers I’m up, damnit,” he throws the pillow off his face to prove his point. 

Satisfied and with a smirk on his face, Bill leaves to shower and get changed, and they break slowly, wiping dreariness out of their eyes. Barry takes a lukewarm shower that extends an extra 15 minutes as flashes of color race behind his eyes. By the time he drags himself out he’s already 3 minutes late, and takes another 5 before he runs down the steps of the inn, forgetting to consider anyone else who may be staying there. It doesn’t matter much anyway, because the rest of them are all gathered, ready for whatever Mike has planned for them. 

Or, ready as they’ll ever be. 

“Nice of you to join us,” Eddie comments. There’s no heat to it, Barry understands looking at him, and decides to take it in stride. 

“My pleasure,” he tells him, voice low, still not used to making jokes with the group. 

“So,” Beverly starts for them. “What sorts of welcome back activities do you have for us, Mike?”

“At ass o’clock in the morning,” Eddie chimes in.

Mike smiles around at them, glad that they’re in a better mood, and his gut twists knowing that he’s the one who has to break their spirits today. 

“We’re going to head across town,” he tells them. “Take the scenic route. Hopefully it’ll jog some more of your memories.”

“What does the scenic route entail?” Barry asks, raising his hand slightly then putting it back down immediately. 

“A walk-through,” Mike clarifies. “No cars today. For now at least.”

Following a series of mumbled groans of protest from Eddie and encouragement and slaps on the back from Ben, they make their way out of the inn and around town. Barry listens to them point out places they remember, and laugh over stories that pop into their head.They walk past past the library, the school they apparently went to, a new mall none of them remember being there, and lots and lots of houses. Barry thinks nothing of it until they meander from the streets of Derry into… the trees of Derry?

 _He wasn’t kidding when he said the scenic route_ , Barry thinks as they hike through a forest of trees, over hills as the sun fully rises above them. Over train tracks and across streams, they fall into comfortable silence, content listening to the crack of sticks under their shoes, the running water, the crunching of leaves. They follow their feet after Mike falls back without any of them noticing, moving forward solely by the instinct of summers they barely remember. 

“The Barrens,” Beverly breathes when they come to a flat area. 

“This is where we used to come,” Ben smiles, taking the lead and moving steadily forward. “After the Rock Fight.” 

“The clubhouse,” falls out of Barry’s mouth, and Ben beams at him. 

“Yeah,” he nods, sending joy directly into Barry’s eyes.

“You built that for us,” Beverly remembers, gesturing to Ben, who grins sheepishly and nods again. 

“You did!” Eddie chimes in happily. “I remember that.”

They search for the hatch in the ground, Beverly tripping over a large branch, and when Ben falls through the ground, they do nothing but watch. What could they have done when the ground opened up and swallowed their friend out of nowhere, right? They’ll all blame surprise if it comes up later. 

Ben’s out of breath mumbles come up through the hole, and they let out a communal breath they were only half aware they were all holding. 

“Come down!” Ben calls, breath still knocked out of him. He tries to breathe in deep but winds up inhaling stale dust, his coughs making Eddie pause in his step but ultimately climb down the ladder balanced haphazardly on a log supporting their roof. 

The moment he steps down onto the floor of their clubhouse, Barry is hit in waves of the feeling of nostalgia. He doesn’t know exactly from what yet, as most of what he’s looking at is layers of dust. He looks around, stuck in his spot until Mike lands behind him from two rungs up, making Barry jump and take a few steps to the side. 

“Wow,” Beverely breathes, picking something up and blowing off the dust to reveal a comic book from 1992. Eddie looks like a lightbulb goes off, and moves determinedly toward a break in the planks on the floor, reaches in between them and pulls out a small red ball. He blows off the dirt. 

“The paddle ball,” Bill laughs.

“That thing cost me a week and a half’s allowance,” Ben remembers with a smile. 

“Oh shit,” Eddie stands from his crouch and turns to Ben with a sheepish look on his face. He hands him the little ball, and Ben looks at it fondly. “Sorry, Ben.”

“Oh my god,” they hear Bill say to himself, sorting through a table stacked with forgotten memorabilia. 

“How do we all not remember this was here?” Eddie comments to no one in particular. 

Barry wanders into a corner of the clubhouse that’s not particularly well lit, not that much of it is to be honest. There’s a faded, dusty poster on the wall and a series of hooks where he assumes they hung their coats. A flash of a yellow rain jacket appears on one of the hooks and disappears so quickly it’s like a punch to the gut. And he feels a grumbling from somewhere inside of him. 

“Time to float,” he spits out in a voice that’s not his own and immediately a feeling of horror runs through his body, making him stumble back a step and the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. His hand slaps over his mouth when he hears someone trip over something, and he turns to see Ben recovering from a short fall, and Mike and Bill holding something in their hands, ready to strike, 

Barry realizes belatedly that it’s so dark in this corner they probably can’t see him in it very well. “Oh my god,” he muffles through his hand. “Oh my god I’m so sorry,” he apologizes, taking his hand away from his mouth and stepping out of the shadows. Beverly falls back into sitting too as she lets out her sigh of relief. “I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to say that I don’t know where that came from.” He sees everyone relax so much that they lose a few inches on their posture and heavily sigh. Mike doubles over onto his knees and Barry feels bad.

“Jesus fuck, Barry,” Bill breathes. “Don’t do that.”

“It was involuntary, I’m sorry,” Barry says again. Then after a beat, “He used to say that to us, didn’t he?” 

They all stare at him for a moment, not wanting to say anything until Beverly and Ben look toward the ground, not liking the eye contact. 

Mike comes up to him and puts a hand on his shoulder lightly, a somber look on his face. “Yeah. He did.”

“And that stupid fuckin dance,” Eddie shudders behind Mike as he moves away from him. Barry grimaces at the thought. 

“Guys?” Bill turns around with what looks like an old coffee can in hand. He holds it up to them. “This says S-ss-Stan,” he states, sounding heavy. “‘For the use of Losers only.’”

Still slightly on edge, more so at the mention of the name, he can basically hear Eddie gulp as Bill reaches for the tin’s cover. “Bill...” he says nervously, but Bill doesn’t stop. He pries off the top and pulls out- what is that? A shower cap?

Barry feels something brush by his hair and flinches away from the ceiling. “Fuck,” he says lightly. The rest of the Losers turn to him. “I think there’s spiders,” he explains, rubbing his hand through his head to try and knock anything that might have crawled in loose. 

Beverly is the first to laugh. It’s light, more of a giggle that turns into full on laughter when Ben and Mike join in, followed closely by Eddie and Bill. 

“Wasn’t Richie the one who said that he wasn’t afraid of spiders in his hair?” Ben laughs. Beverly nods through her giggles. 

“And then he got spiders in his hair too,” Bill grins. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen something bite him in the ass so quickly.”

“Not that it changed his mind at all,” Mike adds. “He refused to wear it even after that, and went on a rant about how he’s gonna turn into Spiderman or something.”

“Oh Stan,” Beverly shakes her head fondly as Barry sees a flash of the same boy, curls tucked under a shower cap, handing him one of his own. “Always taking care of us.” 

Bill pulls out the rest of the shower caps, throwing one at Ben, who catches it easily. “I remember him looking so insulted when Rich told him we weren’t afraid of spiders,” he says as Bill sits and sorts through the rest of the caps. 

“He was right though. Stan was always right,” Eddie adds, and snorts. “Would never tell him that though.”

Mike huffs a laugh. “You know, that conversation, after that, I actually asked Stan if he would want to go to Florida.”

“When we were talking about getting out of Derry?” Beverly asks. 

Mike nods. “When he asked if we thought we would all still be friends,” Mike shifts uncomfortably. “When we grew up.” He gulps, staring at the floor as he recalls. He shrugs. “It never sat right with me, so I asked him if we would stick together.”

Bill nods and looks down. “We should have,” he says softly.

“I told him-” Beverly stutters. “I told him he didn’t have to be so…. Sad.” She shakes her head. “God I was a piece of work back then.”

Bill shakes his head and stares off into the distance, trapped in a memory. 

“He was old before his time,” Ben states fondly. 

Eddie has taken to leaning against a pillar as he remembers. “I wonder what he was like all grown up.” 

“Probably what he was like as a kid,” Barry says more to himself than anyone else. But he’s done hesitating and apologizing for remembering things about a life that didn’t feel like his yesterday. He’s over trying to deny the feeling of belonging and home and what makes sense. So he looks up at the rest of them and shrugs. “The best.”

Bill lets out a light huff from where he’s seated, now with a shower cap on each knee and another in his hand, and smiles sadly up at him. “Here,” he all but whispers as he tosses the one in his hands at him. As it lands in his hand Barry recognizes it as Stan’s and gravity pulls the muscles in his face lower than he thought they could go. Desperate to break himself and the group out of this fit of mourning, he pipes up again. 

“Alright Mike, what are we doing here?”

Mike stands slowly, still caught up in the memory that is Stan. “The ritual,” he gulps, knowing they aren’t going to like it. “To perform it, it requires a sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice?!” Ben objects, standing up quickly and almost hitting his head on one of the beams.

“Not that kind of sacrifice,” Bill mends quickly. “Mike?”

“The past is buried, but you’re going to have to dig it up. Piece by piece,” Mike begins ominously, something Barry is coming to appreciate less and less. “These pieces, these artifacts… that’s why we’re here. They’re what you’ll sacrifice. And since Stan isn’t here to find his...” Mike takes a moment to look around the room at five uncomfortable faces. “I figured we should all be here together to find his artifact.”

Bill sends a tiny supportive smile up at Mike as Eddie takes a shower cap and puts it on his head. 

“I think Bill just did that.”

Beverly inhales an audible, shaky breath. “I think I need to-” she clears her throat. “I’m going to go up,” she gestures vaguely to the ladder and makes her way out of the clubhouse. 

“Yeah,” Barry agrees, watching her go. “I could use some air too.”

They make their way out one by one in silence. Every good, nostalgic, or fun moment they’ve had since landing back in Derry has quickly been followed by moments of grief, horror, and/or extreme discomfort. Every joyful memory has been balanced out by a dreadful one. It’s not a coincidence. Beverly needs to breathe. She drops down onto a log, Bill following shortly after. Barry scratches at his head because he swears he can still feel spiders in his hair.

Eddie is the first to speak up when they’re all out. 

“Okay, Mike, so where, how are we supposed to find our tokens?”

“How are we supposed to know what they are?” Ben asks beside him. 

“You’ll know,” Mike nods quickly, receiving an immediate scoff. “There’s things this town does to people. Especially grown-ups. There’s things this town doesn’t want you to remember. That It _wants_ you to remember. And to be honest, you might not want to either.” Eddie throws his hands up. “There’s more to our story. What happened that summer. And those blank spaces, like pages torn out of a book. That’s what you need to find.” Mike looks at faces of reluctance and lack of eye contact. “We need to split up.”

 _“What,”_ tumbles out of Barry’s mouth instinctively. 

“You each need to find your artifact. _Alone._ That’s important _,”_ Mike continues like he didn’t even say anything. “When you do, meet me at the library tonight.”

Eddie objects, like any sane person would, bringing up survival rate statistics being higher if they stick together. Barry’s in agreement with him, but with no support from the other three, they head off in different directions, dreading what may come rising to the surface from the depths of their subconscious.

~~~

Barry walks aimlessly through some random streets of Derry, thinking about how stupid this is. And unfair. He barely remembers the basics! Let alone anything the town doesn’t want him to remember. Or that apparently he wouldn’t want to remember. His brain doesn’t want him to remember anything! Does three different amnesias ring any bells??? The last thing he wants to remember is some traumatic thing that the evil clown entity wants to remember, for god’s sake. This is unfair. At least the rest of them know who the hell they were when they lived in this god forsaken town. 

His feet lead him to the town square, where new buildings overtake the posted up doors of closed small businesses. He stays on the outskirts, watching people pass by, probably preparing for the town fair that creepy receptionist mentioned yesterday. 

Oh god, was it only yesterday?

His feet take him to two glass doors, covered in old newspaper to prevent people from peering in. There’s no immediate difference between this storefront and any of the other closed businesses except for the fist-sized hole in the glass that he reaches through to open the door. The door swings open with a loud, long creak, sending clouds of dust through the air. He steps in hesitantly, crossing the threshold into a dark, cobwebbed abyss. The door closes gently behind him, and when his eyes adjust he finally realizes where he is. 

There are arcade games everywhere. Pac-man, Galaga, Dig Dug, Missile Command, Centipede, Crazy Taxi, NBA Jam, every game he could think of from the 80s and 90s. We walks through the aisles, trying to remember playing each game. His feet stop him in front of Street Fighter. This one. This is the one he remembers. It was his favorite above all. 

He turns, spotting the token machine, and puts in a dollar. A singular token drops out, and Barry doesn’t have the capacity to think about how much of a rip-off that is. Instead he hears a woman’s voice calling after him. 

_“Richie, you’ve been at that arcade every day for the past week!”_

_“Yeah, mom, best week of my life!”_

He shakes his head of the first memory he’s had of his mom, and returns to the game and inserts the token. 

_The token clinks into the machine and in no time Richie’s fingers are slamming the buttons, yanking the joystick around with reckless abandon. The boy next to him has his tongue between his teeth, brows furrowed in concentration. Richie glances over and grins. He’s winning. He’s unbeatable. They’re leaned in close over the screen, their characters’ battle cries ringing in their ears._

_“Come on…” the boy beside him growls at the screen, the fingers on his buttons hitting harder as he loses._

_“Yes!” Richie exclaimes when the game announces him as winner._

_“Damn!” the boy slaps the console lightly and straightens up away from the screen in defeat. “You’re fuckin good,” he tells Richie with a smile on his face._

_They slap their hands together, agreeing on a good game as the console announces its Game Over. Richie grins back at him._

_“One more game?” he asks, pulling out another token and showing it off. “I’ll go easy on you this time.”_

_The boy sends him a sideways smile but shakes his head. “I can’t, I gotta go.” Richie’s grin falters. “But I’ll be back in here probably in the next couple days.”_

_“I’ll be here,” Richie’s grin is back. “Defending my title as Number 1 Street Fighter.”_

_“I’ll take that title from you one day!” the boy promises him, walking backwards toward the exit. Riches watches him go as he spins around smoothly and pushes through the glass doors._

_“Good luck with that!” he calls a little too late._

_Really though, best week of his life. Sorry mom._

_“Richie!” he hears softly from behind him. He turns, looking for the voice. “Rich!”_

_“Bill?” he calls into a crowd of kids that don’t pay attention to him. He looks around but doesn’t see anyone addressing him._

_“Richie!” he hears again. It’s a whisper-yell, and it doesn’t sound like a voice he knows anymore. He turns back around. “Rich over here!”_

_Richie brows furrow. There’s no one here._

_Until his eyes turn back to the game._

_There's a new character on the screen. He’s got shaggy black hair, glasses, and he doesn’t look like a fighter. He looks like….. Richie._

_The background is changed. It’s not one he’s ever seen before. It kind of looks familiar. It kind of looks like the house on Neibolt._

_“Hey Trashmouth, look it’s me!” the video game version of Richie’s mouth moves and waves at him. He’s turned toward him, staring at him through the screen._

_“What the shit?” Richie mutters to himself._

_“Check out what I can do!” game-Richie tells him. Richie watches himself do kicks and flips, attacking the air like he was actually part of the game. The virtual wind blows the trees in the background, a car passes by to the left. A curtain in one of the windows moves._

_Richie leans closer to the screen. How is that possible? He’s got to be hallucinating, right? He reaches out toward the screen needing to touch it to see if it changes back._

_His fingers get to the screen. Then they go through it._

_A white face appears in the window with a giant grin on its face, and when Richie recognizes it he yells and jumps back, removing his fingers from inside the screen of the game before It can reach them. When they’re clear of the screen, a scorching pain pierces through his fingertips, and he yells again in pain. There’s deep cuts on each finger that made it through the screen, and soon enough blood comes bubbling to the surface. A lot of it._

_“Fucking shitting hell,” Richie curses, gripping his bleeding hand with his other as if that would dull the pain or stop the bleeding. He looks back at the game._

It _is in the doorway of Neibolt._ It _is grinning at him._ It _looks away and looks at Richie’s video game character._

_“No,” Richie tells It, but It steps forward anyway. “No!”_

_Richie jumps for the controls and slams on the buttons. His fingers sting as he pushes the joystick to get game-Richie to run, but the screen doesn’t change as he just runs into the walls. He turns his character to throw a last minute kick at It right behind him, and it lands. The Street Fighter affects hold up as he fights, but he’s playing in a panic. He’s not thinking about his moves._

_There’s no health bar for either of them so Richie doesn’t know when it’s supposed to end, until it turns into something big, giant._ Oh my god, _Richie realizes._ It’s the monster from I Was a Teenage Werewolf _. He’d seen the movie two weeks ago with Ben and it hadn’t sat right with him since._

_Richie watches It grow twice the size of Richie’s character, Richie’s character bending backward to look at it. It’s jaws open up to yellow fangs. Wide enough to swallow game-Richie whole._

_“No,” Richie can only breathe. The game flashes GAME OVER on the screen, but the wolf still moves. Richie slams down on all six of the buttons and yanks the joystick in every direction, but game-Richie doesn’t move. It bites down onto game-Richie but doesn’t eat him. Instead It turns toward the screen, toward the real Richie, and smiles. Game-Richie’s legs stick out from between its yellow teeth, and there’s some suspicious red around the corners of its mouth. Street Fighter characters don’t bleed._

_It stares at Richie, GAME OVER still flashing on the screen. It takes a step closer to the screen and Richie runs, leaving his forgotten blood to drip down the abandoned console._

The token doesn’t work. It’s not exactly a surprise as the arcade has been shut down for who knows how long, but the clang of the token falling out of the slot echoes through the room, making Barry jump. He falls back a few steps as he gets catapulted out of the memory and back into his time. 

What the fuck. What the _fuck._

The screen flickers and he decides he can’t be in here anymore. He needs a lot of air and a lot of space from that game. He grabs the token out of the slot and takes long strides toward the door and yanks it open, the blast of air only mildly placating. He lets the door slam behind him and doesn’t stop walking until he’s in the middle of the empty street. 

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. _1… 2… 3… 4… 5… 6…_ He does it two more times before he turns back toward the building. 

It’s just a building. That’s all it is. There’s nothing suspicious about it or scary. He’s definitely gone into much sketchier buildings. It was just the most intense, vivid memory he’s had this entire time.

He shakes his head at the building and points at it. “Fuck you!” 

In his peripherals he sees someone crossing the street look at him. He puts his hand down but doesn’t acknowledge them, hoping they’ll just keep walking. 

But they don’t. Instead, the person turns fully toward him and stops, also in the middle of the road. Barry glances at them out of the corner of his eye and has to double take. Is that? That’s not…

Barry turns toward them. They’re too far away for him to be sure, but he’s pretty goddamn certain he knows who the fuck that is. 

Once Barry turns, the person smiles at him, then turns and continues walking. 

“Hey,” Barry calls after them. They pay him no mind. Barry jogs after them. “Hey!” He makes it to the intersection, but by that point they’re already turning another corner. They look back at him as they do and Barry’s never been more sure in his life. 

“Fuches!” he screams, running toward the corner he disappeared behind. He reaches toward his waistband and pulls out his gun. “Hey, Fuches!”

He rounds the corner into an empty patch of grass, and stops dead in his tracks. Fuches has a gun too, but it’s not pointing at him. It’s pointing at a man, on his knees, with his hands tied behind his back. 

Fuches looks at him, tilts his head and smiles. “Hey Barry.”

Barry looks between him and the man on the ground, wondering what his play is. His hand twitches at the trigger because he wants nothing more than to shoot this motherfucker, but maybe he shouldn’t escalate the situation just yet. Instead he keeps his gun up and takes slow steps further into the clearing.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Fuches,” he asks though it sounds more like a demand. 

“Is that any way to greet your mentor? Who took you in when you had nowhere to go?” Fuches asks innocently. 

At Barry’s voice, the man on the ground looked up. He blinks at him. Barry spares a glance at him, ready to scream _“took me in?!”_ but the words die in his throat when the man speaks. 

“Richie?” his voice is soft, hurt. His brown curls fall in front of thin wire glasses and hazel eyes that peer into his soul. Barry can’t breathe.

“Stan?”

It’s not Stan. It can’t be Stan. He’s supposed to be dead. 

“Richie, why do you have a gun?”

Barry, whose gun lowered slightly during the shock of their reunion, looks at it as if he forgot he was holding it. And when he looks at where it was pointing he spots the grin on Fuches’ face. He sees red and his gun is back in position. 

“What the hell do you know about this, Fuches,” he demands. 

“Oh, I don’t know what you mean,” Fuches shakes his head innocently. He looks down at Stan. “You don’t know this man, do you Barry? We’ve got a hit ordered on him.”

“What?!” Stan squeaks. 

“Stop!” Barry yells taking two steps forward, stopping when Fuches presses the barrel of his gun against Stan’s head and Stan squeezes his eyes shut. “You don’t have the fucking balls,” he spits. 

Fuches giggles, something that sounds extremely misplaced in the situation. He gives a dramatic gasp and looks back up at him. “Do you want to play a game, Barry?”

Now he’s been thrown off. “A- a fucking game?” Barry sputters. “Are you fucking serious?”

“Oh come on Barry,” he laughs, waving his gun around carelessly that makes Barry flinch. “Not a game like Street Fighter.” Wait what the fuck? How did he know about that? “More like a game of truth…” Fuches points his gun at Barry, whose hands clench around his gun. He moves the gun slowly back to Stan’s head. “...or dare.” 

“What the fuck kind of sadistic shit is this?” Barry yells at him. “Fuck you what the fuck is wrong with you?!”

Fuches laughs a high pitched laugh that doesn’t sound like his, then turns back to him with his head tilted. “Ohh, but you wouldn’t want anyone to pick truth, though, would ya, Barry?” Did Fuches always have a lazy eye he didn’t notice? “You wouldn’t want anyone to know what you’re hiding. Especially not all your new friends.” 

A smile makes its way onto Fuches face that doesn’t fit his face. It curves up, higher than he thinks Fuches’ cheekbones go, and stretches down alarmingly close to his chin. Are- are his eyes turning yellow?

“I know your secrets, Barry,” Fuches tells him through that smile. “All of them.”

Barry shakes his head. “You’re not Fuches.”

“And you’re not Richie,” It claims and swings the gun back toward Barry and shoots. 

“Rich!” he hears Stan scream. Barry ducks out of the way and brings his gun back up shooting back at It. The bullet barely phases It when it goes through Fuches shoulder, laughing while still pointing its gun where Barry just was. 

He hears a gasp behind him and risks taking his eyes off of It. Oh fuck. It wasn’t aiming for Barry. 

Barry runs back over to the man clutching a growing red stain on his torso. He catches him as he falls, doing his best to ease him onto the ground. Barry looks at the blood stain on his awful yellow patterned shirt, and the long fingers covered in blood on top of it. He puts his own hands on top of his and applies pressure to curb the bleeding. He looks up to his face and freezes. 

The man has long, shaggy dark hair, thick rimmed glasses, and a face that looks just like the photos Mike showed him. Actually, looking at him, everything looks just like the photos Mike showed him.

“Richie?” 

He coughs, spitting up blood, and looks at him. “Who the fuck are you supposed to be?”

“Shit,” Barry breathes. “Shit shit shit shit shit.” He presses harder on Richie’s wound, trying to figure out what to do. He looks up, suddenly remembering who was around him. 

But there's no one there. Not-Fuches and Stan are both gone, no sign that they were ever here in the first place. Barry looks back down at Richie’s body. It’s gone still.

“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fucking shit hell balls,” he mutters to himself. He takes a hand off of Richie’s and taps his face. “Hey,” he says desperately. “Wake up you’re not dead you can’t be dead.” 

Barry taps his cheek and cups his face in one hand and shakes it until his head twitches on its own. Barry flinches back, and it twitches again. The next twitch includes his whole body, and Barry takes both of his hands off of him. Richie’s body starts shaking and Barry’s pretty sure he’s having a seizure, so he turns him on his side, takes his hoodie off and tucks it under his head. 

But something’s not right. Something about Richie is… changing. Something pops, and Barry looks down toward his feet. Something else pops and he looks back up toward his head. Something else pops and- no. No no no no no he recognizes that outfit. He recognizes the orange buttons that changed from the yellow shirt Richie was just wearing. 

He jumps backwards, landing on his ass and crawling away, unable to take his eyes off of the transformation in front of him. The body shakes, glasses breaking, black hair turning bright orange, shoes growing pompoms, and for gods sake the fucking grin that had always sent chills down his spine. 

It jumps up in one smooth motion onto its feet, squatting before Barry, who looks up at it in horror. It grins at him, its face growing longer and more distorted by the second. 

“Hey Barry,” It smiles. “Truth or dare?”

Barry shuts his eyes so tight it makes his eyelids hurt. “This isn’t happening,” he tells himself. “This isn’t real. It isn’t real. It isn’t happening.” He takes a deep breath. “It isn’t real.” He opens his eyes. 

“Boo,” It says, yellow eyes right in his face. 

Barry screams and stumbles up, running for his damn life and not looking back. “Fucking Christ!”

“Come back and play!” he hears Pennywise whine after him. “Come back and play with the clown!”

He doesn’t stop running until his lungs can’t take it anymore. He doubles over to lean on his knees on a random street hopefully somewhere near the inn. 

“Fuuuccckkk!” he screams into the pavement. “Fuck this!”

He breathes heavy for a few minutes, then swings his head around trying to get his bearings.. “Shit.” He’s on the opposite side of town. 

As if he hasn’t done enough walking or running today.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I changed Richie's memory. It didn't feel right it being about his sexual orientation when it's not what's important to Barry or Richie at the moment, and I feel like this kind of tells him about where he was at in life at the time? This memory is a mix between the movies and the book, when Bill and Richie look at a photo album in Georgie's room and Bill puts his fingers into a photo that comes to life and gets cuts on his fingers. It was one of my favorite parts of the book.
> 
> Barry's current fear is that he's not Richie. A little meta, I know. Originally I was going to do that his fear is killing another innocent person, like Chris or the person in he shot in Afghanistan, but I thought maybe that was too dark haha.


	7. Today's Lesson: the more things change, the more things change - IT, by Stephen King, chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why the hell would Barry want to stay in a town that wants to kill him, when he just left a town that wants to kill him?

Barry stops three times on his route back to the inn, and not voluntarily. God, fuck, why couldn’t they have just fucking drove? Then he wouldn’t have had to deal with any of this shit. 

The first time he stops is down another alley. His curiosity had pulled him there when a flyer blew across the street and he accidentally stepped on it. When he looked down, in big bold letters was the word “MISSING” and underneath his shoe was a photo of a young girl named Lizzie Talbot, age 9. Barry looked down the alley where it came from to find a trail of flyers, leading to a wall of missing children posters. Directly in the middle was a flyer for Richie Tozier, age 30, right next to one for Barry Berkman, age 39. 

Barry ripped both of them off the wall, all but sprinting back out of the alley feeling nothing but the need to get out of there. As soon as he got back onto the street, noise hit him like a passing train honking its horn right in front of him. The alley had been silent save for the missing children's posters blowing in the wind. When he looks back down at the crumpled pages in his hand it no longer hosts an image of Richie Tozier, age 30. Instead it says Edward Corcoran, age 12. He flips to the other flyer, and in place of Barry’s name it says Georgie Denbrough, age 7. 

Georgie Denbrough. 

The name rings in his ears for a moment before he can place it. Georgie Denbrough. 

Bill Denbrough’s little brother. 

He’s thrown into another memory, of Big Bill begging them to understand, to come with him to the Barrens. Because Georgie isn’t dead, he’s just missing. 

Barry throws the flyers to the side, not being able to handle looking at them anymore, and walks a little faster in the direction of the inn. 

The second time he stops is back closer to the town square. There’s a pharmacy that he vaguely recognizes, but more specifically he recognizes the back of the building. He sees more than he remembers crouching above the body of a young Ben Hanscom, Eddie patching up cuts in the shape of an H on his stomach. He remembers bickering and sweating and meeting Beverly properly for the first time. 

Then, when he walks past and can no longer see the memory, his gaze crosses to the town square ahead of him and he freezes. The giant Paul Bunyan statue still towers over everyone that passes. 

It hasn’t gotten any less terrifying as time passed, even when Barry is 27 years older than the last time he saw it. It probably wouldn’t be terrifying to him now if the surge of dread didn’t suddenly flow through his whole body. The view has only gotten worse, he realizes as he steps closer. Signs of age rust across Paul Bunyan’s eyes and bone-shuddering smile. Spots he’s pretty sure is bird poop drip down his shoulders from a lack of effort and desire to keep it clean. His shoes are almost devoid of color, probably helped by the teenagers climbing up the podium and sitting on them. 

But at least it's not chasing him this time. He vaguely remembers comparing it to the likes of King Kong and Godzilla, when he recalled what he thought was a dream all those years ago. It chased him like Kong through the town, stomping making the world shake with every step, swinging its giant axe at him, screaming and running away from it with not a single other person in the square paying him any mind at all. He’d tripped and it roared in his face with the mouth and teeth of Godzilla, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if it shot its atomic fire breath at him a second later if he hadn’t somehow convinced himself it wasn’t real. But he couldn’t even convince himself it wasn’t a dream after that. 

A shadow passed by overhead that was probably a bird, but was so sudden that Barry jumped because he swore it was going to move again. He didn’t stick around long enough to see if it actually did. 

The third time he stops is at a creepy old run down house that pulls him toward it. It’s nothing much to look at, aside from overgrown plants, rusty old fences, and a generally dusty dark abandoned house that looks like it’s been there for a century.

Something draws him in toward it, urging him closer, closer, just a little bit closer. Just one more step, Barry, that’s it. But he stops at the gate, his feet refusing to take him any further. He stares up at it, wondering why it looked so familiar. The wind blows, shaking the leaves of two not dead but dying trees on either side of the path up to the door. A car passes to his left and the noise seems drowned out. Inside of that abandoned house, something moves the curtain in the top right corner window. And then his heart drops. 

He knows this place. He takes a shaky step back. This is the place in the video game. His steps are slow, not quite centered. His hands are sweating. The front door, which he could have sworn was shut a second ago, flaps in the breeze. A strong wind comes and knocks the door wider with a loud long creak, and Barry doesn’t know if he actually sees two floating eyes in the pitch black doorway or if he’s remembering it from the game, but he doesn’t want to find out. 

His pace is closer to a run by the time he makes it to the street the inn is located. He isn’t looking both ways before he crosses the street but he is looking in every direction for someone or something following him. Taunting him. He swears he can feel something there. 

He slows down in front of the inn, raking his hands through his hair, dragging his nails against his scalp to feel something other than paranoia, and he’s not sure it works. One last look around and he’s swinging the door open and stepping in to what probably shouldn’t feel like a sanctuary. 

Beverly and Ben are sitting on the staircase, talking quietly amongst themselves. The moment looks soft. Barry tells them to move. 

“Barry?” Ben calls to him, jumping up from the stair he was just sat on. “Barry what happened?” 

“Nothing,” Barry tells him, not pausing on his way up to his room. 

“Where are you going?” Beverly asks after him. “Come sit with us.” 

“No thanks,” Barry doesn’t look back. “I’m leaving.” 

When he gets up to the landing he can see Ben and Beverly exchange a glance in his peripherals. Then he turns and they’re out of view. 

Ben has a bad feeling. Well, he’s had a bad feeling simmering deep in his gut since the moment Mike called him, and it’s only getting worse. 

He takes the stairs two by two, trying to catch up with Barry as quickly as he can. He can’t leave. When he gets to Barry’s thankfully unlocked door, he tells him so. 

“You can’t leave,” he stands in his doorway, insultingly barely winded from his chase. 

Barry is exiting the bathroom with his toothbrush, taking a much less desperate approach to packing compared to last night. “I don’t think I can or want to be here anymore.”

“Barry if we split we all die,” Ben begs.

“Everyone dies, Ben,” Barry tucks his toothbrush into his bag and picks up a shirt from his bed, waving it around to get some wrinkles out. “We all die eventually.”

Ben wasn’t ready for the cynical approach. It’s not really his area of expertise. 

“What did you see out there?” 

He throws the shirt back down on the bed and stares at it, but doesn’t look like he actually sees it. “I saw what Mike said we’d see,” Barry tells his shirt. “Things I didn’t want to.”

And god if that wasn’t a mood. Ben wasn’t prepared for the nightmare he saw with most of his memory intact. He can’t imagine how Barry must have taken it. 

“It’s just trying to scare us.”

“Well it’s fucking working,” Barry picks up his shirt again, shoving it in his bag, to hell with the wrinkles. 

“I thought you-” god, is there any way to approach this that doesn’t sound absolutely fucking ridiculous? That wouldn’t make Barry want to leave even faster? “I thought you wanted to figure all this out,” he tries desperately. “I thought you wanted to remember us. And Richie.”

“I do!” Barry bursts, slamming his hands on either side of his bag. The mattress bounces under the sudden pressure and his bag falls on its side. “I did,” he says softer. He turns to Ben, and it’s the first time Ben’s really seen his face in the midst of their conversation. He almost steps back in surprise. He looks angry and broken and scared all at the same time. He looks so intense, so determined and so ready to let it all go in the same breath. “But based off of what I saw today, what we saw yesterday?” Barry shakes his head. “I don’t know if I do anymore. I don’t know if it’s worth it.”

“It wasn’t all bad,” Ben recovers quickly, hoping he doesn’t look too shaken. “It was one summer that It happened. Followed by the best years of my life. The best friends I could ever ask for. In a way It brought us together!”

The incredulous look on Barry’s face makes him immediately rethink his last statement. “Okay, not the best way to put it, but that summer I met six of the best people I’ll ever meet,” he backtracks, stepping further into the room. “We had some of the best times of our lives that summer.”

“From what I can remember it was also the worst summer of my life,” Barry informs him, turning away again. 

“That’s what it wants you to remember!” Ben cries almost desperately. He’s fully in the room now, just far enough away from Barry that he’s not following him around the small space. “It wants you to be scared. It wants us to run,” he begs as Barry yanks his charger out of its socket. “It wants to split us up so we can’t kill it.” 

“Maybe I don’t want to kill It!” Barry relents, throwing his hands up, moving back and forth through the room, multitasking pacing and packing. “I don’t want to kill anyone anymore!”

Anymore? The entire statement throws Ben both in terms of wording and the outlandish idea that he doesn’t want It dead??? Ben shakes his head trying to make any sort of sense of it. “What? What are you talking about?” 

“I can’t do it anymore,” Barry is full on pacing now. “I don’t want to do it anymore.” He doesn’t look like he’s saying it to Ben. “I can’t- I can’t. Starting now, right? I don’t…” Barry’s shaking his head and looking at the floor, wringing the feeling of helplessness out of his hands. Ben isn’t exactly sure what he’s referring to, and he’s pretty sure it’s something he’s not ready to share. A door slams closed in the hallway, but he doesn’t move to check on it.

“Barry,” he says softly, reaching for him slowly. “Hey, Barry,” he repeats when Barry doesn’t acknowledge him. He still doesn’t, but Ben wants to try and get his attention before he touches him. He can’t think of anything else. 

“Rich.”

Barry freezes in his step when Ben puts a hand on each arm helping to still him. Ben looks into slightly manic eyes and takes a deep breath in the hopes that Barry will subconsciously mimic him. “If we don’t stop It It’s going to keep killing. It’s going to take and torment more people, more kids. Just like It did to us.” 

Barry’s jaw ticks. His hands clench at his sides. But he doesn’t say anything. Ben hopes that means he’s considering it. 

“We can’t let it take any more people.” The eye contact is intense, but Ben knows that it’s the only way to get through to him right now. “Not when we know we can stop it.”

“Do we know though?” Barry breathes and Ben can feel it on his face. “Because it feels like we’re doing exactly what It wants.”

Ben has no argument for that. Things did seem to be going well for Pennywise, he got them all there, he's successfully freaking each of them out multiple times. But at the same time, Mike has also come through. “Mike has a plan,” he decides on saying instead of telling him all this. “A plan he’s been working on for 27 years. When has he ever let us down?”

Barry frowns, but his fingers have unclenched a little, which Ben takes as a good sign. 

“You know conveniently, nothing comes to mind,” Barry sends Ben a weak smile, and Ben grins. 

“Exactly,” Ben reassures, rubbing a hand up and down Barry’s arm. “We got this.”

Barry takes a shaky breath, then a shaky nod. 

“Alright,” Ben nods too. “Good.”

There's a clunking coming from the stairs, like something is falling, and Barry tenses up again. Ben releases him quickly and closes his door. “Take a minute, come on, sit down.” Ben turns him to the bed and Barry drops down, Ben following right after. “I’m going to splash some water on my face, shake it off for a minute, then we’ll get some food. Have you eaten yet?”

As if he’s just realizing it, Barry shakes his head no in surprise. 

“Alright, you pick the place and I’ll meet you downstairs in ten?” Ben swears he can hear Bill’s voice coming from downstairs and has a bad feeling Barry doesn’t need added to his mental state. He gets up and claps him on the shoulder, which immediately feels like an awkward mistake. He retracts his hand and shakes it off. “Then we can go meet Mike at the library. Cool?”

Ben needs verbal confirmation, it seems. So Barry nods a little numbly. “Yeah,” he confirms, voice a little hoarse. 

“Great!” Ben smiles a little too enthusiastically. “See you in a few.” Then Ben exits a little too quickly and Barry can hear him running down the stairs calling out Bill and Beverly’s names. 

Fuck he’s gotta get out of here. He was right. This place isn’t a sanctuary. Not at all. The walls feel too close to him and the air tastes stale even with the window open. He’s gotta get out. 

He’s still mostly packed since his hasty attempt to leave yesterday, so he throws the last of his things in and zips up his bag quickly. He then quietly exits his room and tries to avoid all the creaks on the floor. 

Sorry Ben. 

Conveniently, and technically legally required, there’s a fire escape on the second floor he climbs onto and descends well before his ten minutes are up, then he’s in his car driving away.

~~

Unfortunately, ever since Ben mentioned the word ‘food’ Barry’s stomach has been grumbling. So Barry finds himself at a retro looking diner with multicolored seats and questionable decor. The hostess tells him to take a seat anywhere, but the only seats available are booths at the window or singles at the bar. If there’s one thing he hates more than window seats, it’s sitting at the bar. So he reluctantly takes a seat on worn red leather, exposed and vulnerable to the world through the glass. 

He sees through the menu, looking but not reading any of the options. He can’t focus. When he realizes this he tries so hard to focus instead he zeroes in on the breakfast option of two eggs-any style, sausage, and toast, and stays there for a full minute, trying to make his brain comprehend. He squeezes his eyes shut, blocking him off from the menu.  _ Get it together, Barry. _ When he opens them again, he feels overwhelmed with the amount of words all on one page. God, why do diner menus always have to have every type of food under the sun? It’s too much. Just pick a theme or something. 

A waitress comes by placing a water and individually wrapped straw in front of him. “Do you know what you want yet, hon?” she asks. 

Barry looks up at her, blinking. She looks familiar. Why does she look familiar?

She cocks her head to the side and he realizes he hasn’t answered her. “Do you need another minute?”

He snaps out of it, shaking his head as both a response and an attempt to get the static out. “No, uh, can I get… the eggs sausage and toast? Scrambled please.” 

“Sure thing,” she nods. She has a slight southern accent that he likes, making ‘thing’ stretch and sound like ‘thang.’ She starts walking away when Barry calls after her. 

“Oh, and can I get a cup of coffee?”

“You got it,” she nods with a wink, pointing a pen she pulls out of her apron at him. “I’ll be back in a jiff.”

Barry collapses back into his seat, the worn leather accepting him in a cold embrace. His water sits in front of him as he wills it to be closer. In his mouth already. He sighs when nothing happens and drops his hand on his straw, reluctantly unwrapping it himself. Someone yelps and giggles, and Barry cranes his neck to see a group of teenagers in the corner booth, laughing and throwing ice at each other. 

He’s unwillingly thrown into another memory. He turns his head and Eddie blows the wrapper of his plastic straw directly into his face. He yelps when it hits his glasses, flinching backward in surprise. Mouth agape with the feeling of chaos rising in his blood pressure, he grins and reaches into Stanley’s drink, who quickly yells at him clawing at the dirty hands in his soda, and grabs a piece of ice, throwing it at Eddie. Eddie shrieks and does his best to dodge, just ramming himself into Mike next to him, who is just shaking his head at them.

“You guys are gonna get us kicked out again!” Stanley scolds, trying to prevent him from reaching into his cup again. Eddie has mischief in his eyes and is about to attack again, their battle only interrupted by their waiter coming with their food. 

“Thank God,” Stanley falls back into his seat, looking gratefully at the waiter. 

“Are you even allowed to say that, Staniel?” he hears himself ask. Stanley glares at him and steals a handful of his fries, shoving them all in his mouth at once. 

Barry blinks and the memory is gone, the corner booth filled with kids from the 2010s, not the 1980s. Their clothes are a drastic difference in Barry’s eyes in more neutral tones than Eddie’s pink polo and his own brightly patterned shirt. His waitress comes back with his coffee, face with the ghost of a skeptical look, and he realizes he’s an adult man, alone, staring at a group of teenagers. He flushes and thanks her, immediately looking down at his coffee. 

He doesn’t even feel like drinking it anymore, but he brings it up to his lips and takes a long sip of hot, bitter black coffee. Somehow the burn on his tongue makes him feel a little better. 

When his food comes he leans his head on his hand, face turned slightly toward the window. There’s two people across the street from the diner, and for a second it looks like him and Beverly, smoking a cigarette and laughing with each other. Even though it’s him, he can’t hear what they’re saying, but he feels in his chest fondness, belonging and a grin on his face.

“Come on!” someone yells and gets their attention. Down the block is Bill and Stan, who is yelling at them to hurry up so they can get out of there. Barry looks back at where he and Beverly were, but only sees two people he doesn’t know running to catch up with their friends he also doesn’t recognize. 

He only manages to stomach half of the eggs and sausages before he feels a headache coming. The slight accompanying nausea definitely isn’t being helped by the eggs, so he gives up on those. Honestly he’s not sure if it’s because of the stress or because of all the involuntary memories forcing their way to the front of his mind. Or a combination of both. He’s never dealt with extreme stress terribly well. The consequences of his trip to Derry in the first place a prime example. 

By the time he gets back into his car his headache has gone from a buzz in the forefront of his head, to a living, pulsing beast wreaking havoc on his temples. Massaging them barely phases it, and he resigns to living in this personal hell so long as he can get out of this town. 

He should go back. He really should go back. 

His foot doesn’t lift from the gas pedal though, and he drives slowly through the town, pedestrians jaywalking on every street. 

He should go back, he just left them in the lurch. 

What? No, what the fuck? He doesn’t want to die, especially not by the hands of some fucking clown thing. 

_ If we split we all die, _ Ben’s voice rings in his head.

Who is he to determine who gets to live or die? Who does he think he is?

Oh right, a fucking hitman. 

His hands clench around the steering wheel, begrudgingly pushing down the urge to honk at the next couple that jumps into the street in front of him. 

No. He’s not a hitman. Not anymore. He got out. 

But- fuck. None of them really seem like fighters. Spiritually yes, clearly as they have all elected to stay and suffer through if it means bringing it to an end, but physically? Aside from Ben and maybe Mike the other three are built like lead pencils. Strong enough to keep getting back up when broken, but easily broken in the first place.

A writer, a fashion designer, a librarian, an architect, and a risk analyst. God was he really the only one trying to get out of this? 

It’s a ritual. It’s just a ritual. There’s not going to be any actual fighting involved. They’ll be fine. 

Fuck.

He didn’t ask for this. He didn’t ask for any of this. He could’ve been happy! He was well on his way to being an actor, he had a girlfriend, he had a new job that didn’t involve killing people, he... well he tanked his last audition, but things were looking up! Aside from the whole… y’know… monastery incident. Speaking of, he had to text Sasha back about missing his shift yesterday. He’d missed a bunch of calls during his whole mental breakdown and never got back to it. Sorry Sasha. Another thing he’s going to have to deal with when he gets back.

If he goes back. 

For fucks sake. 

He makes another left and he’s somehow still in this godforsaken town. How is that even possible? Is he going in circles? It wouldn’t surprise him to be honest. Both in terms of how out of it he feels and just that this town is fucking freaky. 

He finally gets to a less crowded street that doesn’t have people crawling through do-not-cross lights and he feels like he can take a breath, short-lived as it may be. 

And short-lived it is when he passes by a building that looks out of place but is doing its best to blend in with the buildings surrounding it. A great circular window magnifies the symmetry of the building, coupled with even stairs on both sides of the double-doors below it and the Star of David above. 

_ It wasn’t all bad, _ Ben’s voice comes back to him as his brain finally places why he’s drawn to this building. He used to go there once a month, more as Stanley’s 13th birthday got closer that summer. When he couldn’t find Stanley at home he could almost bet he’d find him at Beth Emeth Congregation. He’d drag him out as soon as he could to the disapproval of his father, to go get ice cream, or to the movies, or to the clubhouse, or anywhere else the wind took them that day.

He finds himself back in that church, 27 years later, the feeling of impatience emanating from his fingertips yet again, waiting for something to be over so he can get out of there even though the synagogue is currently empty. Instead he sits, looking up at the small stage in the center of the room. 

He doesn’t exactly remember word for word, but he remembers a speech that summer. Of Stanley standing nervously, looking to him for support in the pews, and finally standing up to his dad in front of everyone at his bar mitzvah ceremony, even a just little bit. A speech that he knew Stanley had worked hard on. That colored in the blank spaces and the emotions they didn’t want to allow themselves to feel that summer. Of transformation and change, and- and one singular curse word said under the roof of a temple of God. And he remembers feeling so much joy and love and admiration for his friend at that moment, even though he clapped and he’s pretty sure wasn’t invited into the building ever again. 

He feels the loss of Stanley all over again, but this time he has context. He knows that he loved him, and he knows what Stanley risked when they went into Neibolt. He knows his fears and his joys, and when they pushed each other down because they knew they’d immediately pick each other back up again. He feels his grief like a growing stain on his heart from a wound that he reopened himself. 

He remembers the grief that painted Bill’s experience down in the sewers when he finally accepted that Georgie was gone. He remembers the pain that haunted Beverly after the incident with her father. He remembers the betrayal on Eddie’s face when his mother forbade him from seeing the only people who care about him. And he knows. 

He has to do this. 

For Stanley, for Bill and Georgie, and for everyone else Pennywise has dragged his teeth through. He can’t let it happen to anyone else. 

He’s never been so sure now that he used to be Richie Tozier, and if that’s all It has to use against him so far, It’s going to have to do a fuck of a lot better than that. 

~~

It’s dark by the time Barry arrives at the library, but there’s one light up toward the top that’s still on. He briefly wonders if the rest of them are there yet when his phone lights up with a call.

“Hello?” he answers, stepping out of his car.

“Where the  _ fuck _ are you, asshole, and why aren’t you picking up your goddamn phone?!” Eddie’s frantic voice comes so loud through the speaker Barry has to distance himself from it. 

“Jesus  _ Christ _ Eddie,” he replies when he’s able to return his phone to his ear. “What the hell are you screaming about, I answered.”

“I called you four times, shit-for-brains,” Eddie’s voice comes back angrily. Glad to see Eddie’s back on his bullshit. “You fucking skipped out on us asshole, where the hell did you go?”

“Fuckin relax, Eds, geez,” Barry honestly just wants him to stop yelling. He cuts off Eddie’s reflexive ‘ _ don’t call me that-’  _ so he can say, “I’m at the library.”

He’s met with silence. 

“...Eddie?”

“You’re at the…” Eddie’s softer, confused half sentence is almost a relief until his volume triples. “ _ YOU’RE AT THE FUCKI _ -”

Two beeps signify the end of the call, and Barry looks at it in confusion. Oh? He was expecting to be yelled at for another five minutes. He shrugs to himself and heads toward the door. Guess this is better than that. 

As soon as he walks through the doors he’s greeted with a crash coming from upstairs and he freezes.

“Mike?” he calls cautiously, keeping his feet light and heading toward the stairs. His hand instinctively reaches behind him but finds nothing but air. Shit.  _ Shit.  _ He’d dropped his gun when It shot “Richie” and didn’t think to grab it before running for his life. 

_ What is he thinking?!?! _ He doesn’t kill people anymore!!!! His old habits need to  _ chill. _

He pointedly doesn’t think about where in the hell that gun with his fingerprints on it could be when he hears a voice he doesn’t recognize yell, followed by another yell that sounds suspiciously like Mike. 

“ _ Shit _ ,” he breathes and runs up the stairs.

He stops at the top of the stairs to analyze the situation for half a moment. There’s glass everywhere, a destroyed display case, two ancient looking axes lying on the floor, and Mike on the floor being pinned down by some guy who-  _ is that a fucking switchblade an inch from Mike’s face?! _

Okay, half moment’s over. 

His first instinct is to go for one of the axes, but he pushes that down in favor of all the personal growth he’s trying to fight for. Instead, he runs over, positions himself quickly above the man trying to stab his friend, and traps him in a chokehold as he tries to say, “Like fried fucking-” 

The last word is cut short with a wheeze as Barry yanks him and his knife backward and uses gravity to his advantage, dropping them both on their backs. The knife goes flying, which Barry thanks whoever for because the man starts clawing at his arms and he knows if he had his way he would have been stabbing him instead. 

The man starts kicking his legs to get loose, gasping and wheezing as he does, so Barry wraps his own legs around him in an attempt to hold him down as best he can. This guy is big and seems kind of manic which is not working in Barry’s favor. 

A scream rings through the room and over the man’s head he can just barely see Beverly, Eddie, and Ben run in. Eddie has a new patch of gauze on his face he doesn’t have time to ask about.

“Fucking Bowers!” Eddie yells running toward them. 

When he gets close enough the guy, Bowers he assumes, launches himself and reaches out, swiping at Eddie’s incoming person, knocking himself slightly loose in Barry’s grasp. Eddie flinches back just in time and Bowers releases a breathless cackle. Barry does his best to regain his hold but he’s moving so much he can’t yet a proper hold on him. 

“Barry where’s your gun,” Eddie demands. 

Barry’s attention snaps to him. “What?!”

“What?!” is echoed throughout the room but Eddie pays them no mind. 

“Where’s your  _ fucking _ gun, Barry?!”

“You have a gun?” he hears Ben ask behind him. Barry doesn’t have time to argue the ethics behind Eddie’s question or attempt to explain away why he has a gun, he just continues to struggle with Bowers and yell in response. 

“I may or may not have misplaced it.”

“Misplaced it?!?” Eddie basically screams. “How the fuck do you misplace a gun?!”

“I’m a little  _ fucking _ preoccupied, Eddie,” he argues loudly and gives up on the chokehold. Instead he braces his shoulders and rocks them to one side, then uses as much force as he possibly can to roll the other way and flip them over so that Bowers is on his stomach. It’s not an easy effort, this guy may be shorter but he has at least 30 pounds on him. Once he gets him over he takes a fistful of mullet and slams his face into the ground once. While he’s recovering Barry yanks his arms out from where they wound up under him. He loops an arm through both bends of his elbows and leans, pushing them together and upwards earning a growl from the guy under him and a buck of his hips in a weak attempt to throw Barry off of him. He plants his feet between his thighs and his knees on either side of him and sits, weighing down any movement from his hips. Bowers struggles weakly underneath him but doesn’t manage to move anywhere so Barry considers it a job well done.

Bowers turns his head to the side facing the rest of the group and spits blood. He heaves in short quick breaths, and it almost concerns Barry until he realizes he’s laughing. 

“You’ll all float,” Bowers’ lips spread to reveal blood covered teeth, grinning at each of them. “Every. Last. One a ya.”

“Dude,” Barry starts. “What the-”

A hand comes flying in his peripherals and before he can stop it a switchblade goes through the side of Bowers’ cheek. 

“Fuck!” Barry finishes, looking up at the source as Bowers cries in pain. “What the fuck Eddie?!”

“Yeah, shit-bag!” Eddie yells, ignoring him and bending to shout closer to Bowers’ face. “Doesn’t feel great, does it?”

“Jesus Christ Eddie!” Ben comes up behind and pulls Eddie backwards. 

“Fuck you asshole!” Eddie yells at him but goes with Ben. 

“Fuck you!” Bowers spits back at him. Ben pulls Eddie back to where Beverly is helping Mike up from the ground. 

“Does anyone actually want to give me a hand?” Barry yells over them, hoping they’ll shut up. “I’m not really sure what to do with him now.”

“Fucking kill him, man,” Eddie comes back immediately. 

“Eddie!” Beverly and Ben scold together. 

“He just tried to kill Barry and Mike, and he stabbed me like an hour ago in case you guys forgot!” Eddie argues, waving his hand around the bandage on his face with the slowly growing red spot. 

Bowers cackles. Barry’s grip tightens and he speaks through his teeth. “He did that?"

Eddie looks at Barry like he forgot he was there. “Yeah he fuckin' did that so I stabbed him right back. Stop  _ fucking _ laughing you deranged psychopath.”

Bowers does stop laughing after a moment, but it’s followed by his face going completely straight and looking Eddie directly in the eyes. “Thanks for giving me my knife back,” he says evenly, followed by a slow, bloody smile. 

“Get him up,” Mike comes toward them, motioning upwards and taking them away from the chill creeping through the room. “Ben, give us a hand?”

Ben leaves Beverly’s side to join them as Barry stands as best he can without releasing Bowers’ elbows. Then his brain seems to catch up with what was happening around him before. 

“Wait, Bowers?” he asks the room. “As in Harry Bowers?”

“Henry Bowers,” Eddie comes towards them too. “As in the fucking guy who chased us and beat us every other day as kids and apparently hasn’t grown the fuck out of it.”

“Why would I?” Bowers barely gets it out before he’s jumping and using Barry as leverage to he kick into Ben’s chest with both feet. Ben falls backwards into Eddie, knocking them down, and Bowers’ weight topples Barry and Mike, who had unsuccessfully tried to catch them reflexively. Bowers slams his head back into Barry’s and jumps to his feet before he can grab him again. “When it’s so damn easy,” he finishes, pulling the knife out of his cheek with barely a grimace. Then he turns to the last person still standing and grins. 

“No,” Ben wheezes from the floor when Bowers runs toward Beverly with a yell. He sticks out his arm and manages to trip him up, but he stumbles, not falls. Instead he takes a misstep on Eddie’s chest and keeps going. 

“Shit,” Barry’s eyesight is a little blurry from the impact but he can see Bowers running toward a blur of red hair. He scrambles up and runs as fast as he can. Mike is right behind him, and he’s not recovering from a headbutt so he passes him in speed and jumps just in time to tackle Bowers’ legs from under him. Bowers falls forward but doesn’t lose grip of his switchblade this time. He swings wildly backward and slices Barry in the arm. Barry flinches back and yells in pain. He glances down at his arm but doesn’t really get to look at it when he sees Beverly raising her arms above her head, grasping something, and he instantly flings his arm out and stops her in the middle of swinging down. 

Bad move, he didn’t think and used the arm that was just cut into. But adrenaline kicks in and he uses the same arm to rip the axe out of Beverly’s hand, push her lightly out of the way, and drive the axe directly into the back of Henry Bowers’ skull. 

Bowers’ body stills under Mike, who had done his best to crawl up and use his body weight to hold him down without getting stabbed or sliced. Only when his fingers fall limp and the switchblade falls out of his fist do they all take a breath. 

But it’s not until Mike climbs off of him and is kneeling to the side rubbing his face that he starts to feel things again. 

“Fuck,” falls out of his mouth, breaking the silence in the room. “Fuck!”

He’s back up again, straight-backed and pacing around the room. He did it again. He just fucking did it again. When is he ever going to stop fucking killing people? Is it just in his blood at this point? He had literally  _ just _ talked to himself about not killing anymore and what happened? No more than five fucking minutes later. 

_ Fuck. _

He’s never going to be able to get out of this life, is he? He’s never going to be a normal person. An actor. He’s never going to be free of this- of this bullshit!

Eddie never thought he’d be afraid to approach someone with a face that looked like Richie’s. He’d got up off the floor in time to watch Barry plant the axe deep in Bowers’ membrane, and then the almost immediate breakdown. Barry is clenching and unclenching his fists, he can almost see the steam coming out of his ears. 

He should clarify: he’s not afraid of approaching him because he just planted an axe in a guy’s head, he’s afraid because he looks like a time bomb ready to take them all down with him. 

But he approaches anyway. 

“Barry...” he says cautiously, taking a step toward him. “Bud…” That felt wrong. Why the fuck would he ever call him ‘bud?’ Barry is shaking his head and squeezing his eyes shut, and makes no indication that he even hears Eddie. “Are you okay?” What a dumb question. 

“Eddie…” Beverly starts but doesn’t know how to end. Ben tears his eyes away from Barry and instead catches on Mike’s bleeding arm. He goes to him and inspects it silently. 

Eddie steps closer. He can hear Barry mumbling to himself. “Never gonna happen... fucking stuck... it’s never gonna stop…” Eddie thinks he might start getting hysterical. He’s starting to move from his entire body clenched in stress to waving his arms lightly, yelling at himself and- did he just laugh? Oh god he’s going hysterical. He doesn’t know what he’s talking to himself about but Eddie feels like he has to say something. 

“It was-” oh god what can he even say? The guy just killed a dude. “It was self-defense. It’ll stand up in a court of law. Also I’m pretty sure he literally just fuckin’ escaped from a mental hospital so…”

Is this making it better? He’s not sure at all but someone needs to fill the silence. 

“And- and it’s fuckin’ fine right? Like realistically he’s just a bad fuckin’ dude, alright. Like multiple attempted murders and at least one successful one. He killed his dad, remember? When he was fuckin’ like 15. Like what the fuck is that man? So you killed a bad person. A really fuckin’ bad person, y’know. Like yeah, technically it’s manslaughter but like… self-defense manslaughter?”

“Eddie...” Mike really doesn’t think this is helping. 

“Whatever,” Eddie barrels on. “Bottom line is, he tried to kill 5 out of 6 of us and none of us could really stop him and he’s dead! Great! Now we don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

“Shut up, Eddie, shut up!” Barry bursts. And yeah, it shut Eddie up. “I’m trying-- so hard! Not-- to fucking-- kill people anymore,” he says breathlessly, like he’s trying not to hyperventilate between words. “I’m trying so--  _ fucking hard _ but…” Janice Moss’s face flashes through his mind again and he has to sit. He drops onto the floor. Then Chris comes too. Then Mayrbek. He didn’t- he didn’t want to kill any of them. He didn’t  _ want  _ to kill  _ anyone. _ But… oh god, he’s killed so many people. “I can’t,” he says into his knees as he draws them close to him and tucks his face in. “It just keeps happening.”

Eddie freezes. What the fuck does that mean. His mind reels back to the restaurant when he said people were trying to kill him. To the gun. And… oh what the fuck. 

“Barry, what the fuck is going on,” he asks as gently but firmly as he can. No avoiding answers this time. “Barry who are you?”

Barry doesn’t respond, to no one’s surprise. Beverly’s heart hasn’t stopped pounding since the moment she walked in the room. But she knows she has to do something now, or never. Her footsteps echo through the library as she moves to Eddie, puts a hand on his arm, then moves past him, kneeling to where Barry sits curled into himself. 

“Barry,” she says softly, watching his every reaction. “Richie,” she corrects herself and watches him tense a little. “We took an oath. A blood oath. To come back and stop this thing, yes, but my oath goes further than that. My oath is to you. All of you. Whatever you’re battling we battle together. It doesn’t matter what you did or what you do, you are stuck with me for the rest of our lives, no matter how long that may be. You can  _ trust _ us, cause we’re in it for the long haul. No matter what.”

Barry’s pulse pounds in his ears and behind his eyes still squeezed shut. He trusts her. He trusts them. He’s known them for a day but he does. But he’s also killed people who trusted him. Who found out his secret. Who were threats to the safety of his secret. And it kills him every single day. And that’s  _ while _ he was trying to get out. He can’t- he can’t do that to them. 

“You’ve got six ride-or-dies,” Beverly tells him. “Richie, Barry, both, or neither, we are going to be with you all of the way. No matter how bad it can be. Anyway,” she says trying to lighten the mood. “How much worse can it get than a psycho inhuman clown that can transform and eats kids, right?”

Barry finally looks up, eyes glossy and big, and Beverly is struck by how much he really does look like Richie, because he is. 

“I’m a hitman.”

His voice breaks. Beverly’s brain sputters. 

“Was,” he mends. “I- I’m not anymore.” He looks up to Eddie, whose jaw is now slack. “That’s why I had a gun.”

“You’re a...hitman?” Ben says from across the room where he’s moved with Mike to see if his arm is salvageable. Not much progress has been made. 

“Yeah,” Barry grimaces. “People would hire me to... people would assign me a hit and I would take care of it.”

“We know what a fucking hitman is, Barry,” Eddie is now pacing. “You’re a- jesus fuck what the fuck, man.” Barry pales. “You know what, that explains so much about you.” 

Barry recoils, not expecting a response like that. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Fuckin' everything man, I don’t know,” Eddie throws his hands up. “I mean the gun for one, but also like,” he gestures vaguely at him. 

Barry jumps up defensively. “Listen asshole I just opened up my life to you. I’ve literally  _ killed  _ people for that secret what the  _ fuck _ is wrong with you? I’m not a hitman anymore. Fuck you.”

“I’m not saying it’s not a good fuckin' secret I’m saying it explains some things about why you are the way you are,” Eddie tries to throw back but it doesn’t make any sense to Barry. 

“How the hell can you-”

“Boys!” Beverly yells and Barry forgot that she was right next to them. “Can we please not do this whole bickering thing again! I want to know more too but can we process and deal with one thing at a time? Barry, we're all here for you and I'm glad you told us, but now that you're up, you’re bleeding, Mike is bleeding, and Eddie, I think you opened your cheek from all the arguing.” Eddie reaches up instinctually to tap his cheek and winces. “We can talk about this calmly while also cleaning ourselves up or you two can sit on opposite corners of the entire library.”

“I can yell pretty loud,” Eddie mumbles indignantly. 

“You’d get to sit next to Bowers,” Beverly turns on him. Eddie blanches and shuts up. “Good. God it really is like we’re 13 again, isn’t it?”

Barry and Eddie both make offended faces at her but she ignores them and turns to Mike and Ben instead. “How does it look?” 

They all turn to Mike’s arm, which is cradling a long deep cut still dripping blood. 

“It’s definitely going to need stitches,” Ben evaluates. “We should get you to a hospital.” He starts to get up but Mike objects immediately. 

“No, there’s no time.”

“Mike you can’t go and fight Pennywise with a giant open wound, it has to get closed up before you bleed out.”

“We have to do it. Tonight,” Mike argues. “We don’t know what else It could have planned.”

“Mike...” Beverly protests. 

“We can at least clean and close it,” Barry suggests. He digs into his pockets and pulls out a small tube. “I have- I have superglue.” He looks around and vague faces and his voice gets lower as he continues. “It… it works fine in place of stitches temporarily. I’ve done it to myself multiple times…” 

Beverly wants to protest but knows there’s no arguing to go to an emergency room. So she sighs and accepts it. 

“I can wrap it up too if you’ve got any gauze,” Ben suggests. 

Mike nods. “First aid kit, under the reception desk.” Ben jumps up to get it and Barry steps away from Eddie and Beverly toward Mike with the superglue. Eddie looks like he wants to say something but keeps his mouth shut until Barry gets over to Mike and is looking at his wound. 

He pushes Barry to the side. “Go fix your own arm,” he nods at Barry’s arm, which honestly he forgot was injured, and turns to greet Ben who is opening the first aid kit to reveal alcohol wipes, gauze and bandages. He waits for Ben to grab what he needs from the kit before he digs through to get what he needs with one hand so he doesn’t get blood inside the box. He grabs a bunch of alcohol wipes and gauze and goes to sit adjacent to Mike, superglue tube in reaching distance of both him and Ben working on Mike. 

He sits and sets his arm on the table, then after a moment of just looking at it, takes two fingers and pinches at each side of it and winces. Why he did that, he couldn’t tell you. It just felt necessary. He rips open an alcohol packet with his teeth and starts wiping everywhere. 

“Fucking clean it first, dumbass,” Eddie smacks his hand away, returning from somewhere. He has a bowl of water in his hand and towels from what looks like the bathroom. 

“That’s what I’m doing,” Barry frowns, reaching for the alcohol wipe that fell from his hand. Eddie pushes his arm away again and pulls up a chair next to him. 

“Just-” he holds up a hand in front of Barry’s face when he looks like he’s going to say something, and puts it down after a moment when he doesn’t. He folds one of the towels neatly and dips it into the bowl, wiping it gently along the outside of Barry’s wound. Barry watches him silently. It’s the least Eddie’s said since he met him yesterday, and that he can remember when they were kids. Not that he remembers everything yet. 

They sit in silence as Eddie works for a long moment. 

“How long,” Eddie finally asks, though it doesn’t really sound like he’s asking. 

“How long what?”

“How long have you been a hitman.”

“Was,” Barry feels the need to clarify even though he’s not even sure of the statement. “I- After…” Knowing now that he probably wasn’t in the Marines, where does his life even begin? “I- I was in the Marines. Or I thought I was. I’m not really sure anymore. I got discharged and when I came back I had no one. Which, I guess makes sense now. Monroe Fuches took me in, he was my- or said he was a friend of my dad’s, and after the army he said he had a way for me to continue to use my skills. So,” he makes a vague, pathetic one-armed gesture and shrugs. “Contract killer.” 

“And you just went with it?” Eddie says, opening a new alcohol wipe packet and pressing it onto his open wound. Barry hisses, sucking in sharply through his teeth. 

“I didn’t have anything else,” he replies through his teeth. “My dad had just died, my discharge was not an honorable one, I did some bad things over there.” He shakes his head. “It was all I had to feel human again.”

“Killing people made you feel human?”

Barry clenches his hand and Eddie presses into him again. 

“I didn’t feel like I deserved to have a good life, but having an assignment made me feel like I had a purpose somewhere. And once I got in, it didn’t feel like I could get out. And I got so depressed I didn’t know if I wanted to get out.”

Eddie pauses to reach over and grab the kit again, pulling a small pack of antibiotic cream and peeling it open slowly. 

“Shouldn’t you close it first?”

Eddie glares at him, then looks warily at the tube of superglue Ben just put down like he was trying to avoid it at all costs, then sighs and reaches for it. 

Barry turns his attention to the floor, wondering what he just accepted into his life. What he just accepted  _ as _ his life. “I only just got into acting last year. It was the first thing that made me feel…. something.” He feels Eddie pinch his skin together to hold it, waiting for the glue to dry, and looks up to find Eddie watching him. Listening. He shrugs. “Anything, really. I wound up on stage with my mark, and I got hooked into acting. I didn’t kill him, but he wound up dead anyway.” 

Eddie looks back at his arm and glues the next bit together. He’s taking much more care than Barry usually would. Or Fuches usually would when patching him up. There’s a frown on his face and his eyebrows are pushing closer to each other. 

“I’m sorry,” falls out of Barry’s mouth. “I shouldn’t have told you guys any of this. My life is all types of fucked up and I don’t want you guys getting tangled in it.”

“Hey,” Ben grips his shoulder from where he’s sitting on the table wrapping Mike’s arm. “We just got you back into our lives. All of us. And whether you remember everything or not, Barry  _ and _ Richie, we’re going to be here for you. If you’ll have us,” he ends with a sheepish chuckle. 

Barry looks at the hand on his shoulder, then up to Ben. His face is filled with nothing but innocent truth and compassion. And this? This is making him feel something too. Just as much, if not more, than the first time he found himself on stage. And he doesn’t know what to do with the strange feeling bubbling in his chest. So he just nods, trying to fight pinpricks in the corners of his eyes. “Thanks Haystack.”

Ben beams at him and Barry has to tear his eyes away. Eddie twists the cap back onto the glue and spreads antibiotic cream over it in silence. When he starts to wrap his arm, Barry has to ask. 

“Do you think I’m a bad person?”

Eddie stutters in his motions, but stays silent. He wraps his arm twice before he speaks again. 

“Why did you take the axe out of Bev’s hands?”

Barry blinks. “The…?”

Eddie doesn’t look at him. “Beverly had the axe in her hands, ready to swing down into Bowers’ head. But you stopped her even though you did the same thing. Why?”

Barry scrunches his eyebrows. He hadn’t even thought about it when it happened, he just knew he had to stop her. He couldn’t let her kill someone. Not when he was there. Not Beverly Marsh, who saved him from himself more times than he could count. Not Beverly Marsh, who doesn’t deserve to feel any iota of what he feels. Not any of them. Not anyone who doesn’t have to. 

“I know what it’s like to kill someone,” he admits. “She doesn’t deserve that.”

Eddie finishes wrapping his arm and secures the end with medical tape. 

“I think you’ve been dealt a bad hand,” Eddie tells him, tapping his work. Barry vividly remembers Eddie’s arm similarly in a cast, the word ‘loser’ in black marker corrected with a red ’v’. “But I think you’re trying to be good, which is what matters.” He shrugs. “Or at least decent.”

Ben snorts beside them and Barry feels a tiny smile creep onto his face. When he’d asked Mr. Cousineau the same question not that long ago, he told him that he was deeply human. And that one terrible thing doesn’t define him. He’d rode that high for weeks, even after Fuches betrayed him to the Feds. But this? The acknowledgement that he’s  _ trying? _ It wasn’t something he knew he needed to hear. Especially not from someone he technically met yesterday. But he did. And he doesn’t think he ever wants to lose these people from his life ever again.

“Thanks Eds.”

Barry holds for the ‘ _ don’t call me that’  _ that never comes, and they sit together for another moment in silence. 

“Guys?” 

All four of them turn toward the stacks of bookshelves where Beverly had hung back far enough to be out of the way but close enough to hear everything. She rushes forward with a worried expression and her phone in her hand. 

“I can’t reach Bill on his cell.”

Oh for fuck’s sake. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this wasn't the expected reaction but they're going to get into it I promise. Also all of my knowledge of fighting is based on things I've seen on tv and in movies soooo.... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	8. I feel like a man standing at the mouth of an old mine-shaft that is full of cave-ins waiting to happen. -IT, by Stephen King, chapter 3

For what feels like the hundredth time today, Barry is running. This time is different, though. He’s not running from Pennywise, he’s running at him. Beverly’s voice rings in his head from 27 years ago. 

_I want to run towards something, not away!_

Well hell if they’re all living out her wish together.

Ben bursts through the front doors of the library first, followed so quickly by Mike and Barry that the doors don’t have time to recoil from being slammed on their hinges before being hit back open by Beverly and Eddie behind him. 

Barry instinctively runs toward his car before he realizes no one else is. 

“Fuck the car, Barry,” Eddie yells at him. “It’s not far it’ll be faster on foot. Also fuck parking.”

God what is it with these people and walking everywhere? Haven’t they all walked enough today?

He keeps running toward his car anyway, suddenly remembering certain precautions he'd made and pivoting toward the passenger side.

“Barry-” Eddie watches him run continue toward his car. Did he even hear him? Eddie slows as Beverly jogs past him. “He’ll catch up,” breezes by his ears, and he looks between his departing friends and the one opening his… passenger door?

Barry doesn’t get into the car. He leans in and reaches for something Eddie can’t see in the dim light that illuminates the inside of his car. It’s quick, it only takes a moment, and when Barry slams the door closed again and turns toward him, Eddie watches Barry’s hands wrapped in shadows slam a mag into the chamber of a handgun with the heel of his hand, and yank back the slide in one practiced motion. He gulps. Something stirs in nervousness at the sight and he despises the feeling. Barry feels blindly for the safety to make sure it’s off, and slips it into his waistband. Then he nods sideways to Eddie who is still watching him, then blinks and they run off after their friends. 

By the time they make it to the house Eddie has a slight wheeze in his throat. This is why he never runs. Barry stops beside him as he reaches into his pocket for his inhaler and shakes it. When he takes one long, medicated breath, he spots Barry with a narrowed glare aimed at his inhaler. Bill is scolding them like the big brother he is. To all of them. 

“It’s my fault that you-you’re all here,” he tells them, having already climbed a few steps above them. “This curse, this fucking thing inside you all. It started growing the day that I m-made you go down to the Barrens because all I cared about was finding G-g-ge-georgie.”

Eddie doesn’t think that’s true. He would’ve done anything for Big Bill when they were younger, sure, they all would’ve, but he didn’t _make_ them do anything. 

“Now I’m gonna go in there,” Bill turns, directing their attention briefly to the already slightly open door, shrouded in darkness and a lurking mystery none of them particularly want solved. Not by themselves, at least. But they’re going to do it anyway. “And I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I can’t ask you t-to-to do this. I-”

Beverly is tired of listening to him wax poetic two stairs above the rest of them, as if they weren’t all in this together back then, and they’re not all in it together now. They may have been separated for the past 20-odd years, but there’s no force above them that can separate them now that they've found each other again. She reaches down into the overgrown grass on the lawn and picks up a broken off piece of the metal fence surrounding them. It’s smooth, and it’s long, with a pointed tip not unlike that of a spear. She adjusts her grip around it. It feels good in her hand. 

“Well,” she interrupts whatever speech he has left. “Good thing we’re not asking you either.”

“Bev..” he breathes, finally taking one step down from his front porch shaped soap box. 

“We didn’t do it alone then, Bill,” Mike continues for her before Bill can object. “So we’re not gonna do this alone now.”

“Losers stick together,” Ben tells him as if he forgot. He’d better not have. 

Mike nods beside him and the group takes a collective breath, accepting the next step of entering the house that gave them nightmares well before they ever stepped foot in it, and the descent they know comes after.

“So…” Eddie all but clears his throat in desperation for someone to get them started. “Does somebody wanna…. say something?”

In a group of six people, especially six people like them, Barry didn’t think it to be possible for all of them to be at a loss for words. No words of encouragement, empowerment, confidence to be offered into the slowly deafening silence. So Barry says the first thing that comes to mind. A phrase that stirred in the base of his throat, waiting to be said, accompanied by one very specific memory. 

“Let’s kill this fucking clown.”

Bill immediately grins a sideways grin, showing off his teeth and sending a chill down Barry’s back. “Always said it best,” he agrees. 

They turn to each other, silently nodding with grins on their faces. 

“Let’s kill this fucking clown,” Beverly repeats with fight in her eyes, and they make their way to the door with new confidence. Bill reaches into his pocket pulling out the flashlight he used last night to flash in Eddie’s face, and clicks it on. They each pull out flashlights of varying sizes, which Mike threw haphazardly at them before running out of the library. 

Eddie replaces his headlamp back in pocket, resolving to save it for later. Five flashlights is probably enough to light up one house for now, they might need to save the battery. 

The first steps into the house on 29 Neibolt Street are some of the most cautious steps they’ve ever taken in their lives, right up there next to the first time they entered as kids. But the feeling is worse, the stench of old wood and something unknown to their palette that reminds them of all of the bad days of their childhood can be smelled before they even break the threshold. And once they do it only goes downhill. 

The floor creaks loudly under each step, threatening to collapse beneath them. But it only threatens, basking too much in their discomfort that it could. The air is stale, leaving their tongues dry and their nose whistling lightly in discomfort. They can taste something in it, something familiar but that they can’t quite put their finger on. It’s different for each of them: for Beverly the taste of the blood that erupted from her bathroom drain, for Eddie the greywater in the Barrens by the sewer opening when he was shoved into it by Bowers, for Bill, the rain he used to bask in until one fateful summer when he couldn’t bear to play in the rain anymore, for Mike the stench of smoke and burning suffocating every one of his senses when he was only a child, for Ben it’s the taste of his own sweat and swallowed screams as he’s hunted by Bowers and his gang, and for Barry it’s some of the Voices Richie used to speak in as a child. Ones that he didn't make up himself and terrified him when they came out of his mouth. They soon discover that breathing through their nose does them no better. 

The continuing steps in are motivated solely by the confidence they refuse to release so easily, tempting as it may be, and the shoulder blades of the person in front of them with Bill leading the way. As much as they don’t want to be pulled in by tricks they may encounter in the house, their curiosity bests them, and they take in every mound of spider-web, every leaf and branch scattered across the floor brought in presumably by blowing wind, every sign of age that seems somehow comforting, knowing that time has altered this place, and with them here now, it will be altered again. 

There’s a light bubbling sound coming from the stairs that draws Barry closer to it. The lack of immediate threat calms them enough to begin to wander from their tight, sheltered lineup. The bubbling is accompanied by a sizzling, the only sound aside from the creak of floorboards and crunching of leaves beneath their feet, every noise outside muted even though they didn’t close the door behind them and a number of the windows were broken. 

Barry spots the source of the sound at the landing of the staircase, an ooze not unlike the one that leaked out of the bowl of fortune cookies at the Jade. The ooze drips down the stairs slowly, sizzling as it burns into each inch of floor it overtakes. But it’s slow and doesn’t seem like it’s coming at them like an attack this time, so Barry deems it a non-issue. 

“Well I love what he’s done with the place,” he tells the group, trying to ease more tension out of their shoulders. 

He’s met with weak smiles and rolled eyes. 

“Beep-beep, Barry,” Beverly tells him, and unlike some of the other times they’ve brought up their past, this one feels more natural. Like she’s right. He half-smiles and lets it go. 

He follows Bill down a hallway, assuming he knows where he’s going when he pushes open a creaky door that grates their eardrums. They’re moving slowly, entranced in the discovery of it all and slightly too afraid to make any abrupt movements. 

Bill leads them into an almost ancient looking kitchen, oven and fridge long since rusted over and completely overtaken by dust and plants growing through the windows. There’s a bunch of wood panels on the ground, and when Barry points his flashlight up there’s a hole in the ceiling to the second floor. 

This is where it happened. Their first battle with It. Eddie. _Bill, Eddie’s arm is broken_. 

Barry spins around, wide-eyed, and in his sudden search for Eddie he hits him directly in the face with his flashlight.

“Jesus fuck, Barry,” Eddie throws his arm in front of his eyes to block the light. Barry’s light lingers there for a second, his mind un-numbing itself at the sight of Eddie’s arm, strong and unbroken. He only lowers it when Bill speaks, knocking him out of it. 

“Hey, hey.” he says barely louder than a whisper. “That’s the basement, right?”

Eddie and Barry follow to where Bill’s flashlight points, an open doorway to an abyss of darkness. Eddie gulps audibly. 

Bill makes his way toward it, stepping over a fallen plastic dining chair and doing his best to feel unfazed. 

That is, until they hear Beverly’s panicked voice call out to Ben. And the door between the hallway and the kitchen slams shut of its own volition. 

“No,” Eddie immediately breathes as Bill throws himself against the door. Eddie does the same, pounding his fists against it. “No! Ben!” 

Eddie and Bill scream for Ben, attacking the door, yanking at the doorknob as hard as they can to no avail. Barry is just about to push them to the side and kick it at its weak spot right next to the knob to free it from the lock when there’s a pounding coming from inside the fridge. Instead of fighting the door to the hallway he stands stock still as his flashlight illuminates the door of the fridge, not ready to face whatever is going to come out of it. 

Eddie catches on next, going still next to Bill when the pounding comes again, reluctantly turning his head toward the fridge, not being able to stop himself. Bill notices too when the rattling of the loose handle gets louder and they turn. Waiting. Dreading. 

The entire fridge is shaking hard enough to move the fridge from its designated spot, the thing inside demanding to be freed. Barry can feel his heartbeat rising toward his throat, banging almost as hard as the monster in the fridge. This isn’t like any hit or any threat he’s ever had to face, contracted or army. This is so much worse. 

The fridge finally stops rattling when the door slowly falls open, the silence somehow even more harrowing. The flickering light in the fridge doesn’t do much to illuminate its contents, but when Bill adds his light to Barry’s Eddie immediately gags. 

Inside the yellowed interior are two legs, two feet, and two hands, none of them bent in a way that should be physically possible. A body folded, squished, shoved into the bottom of a small 1970s fridge in such a way that they couldn’t even tell how each limb was connected. 

But the worst part was the middle, which they didn’t notice at first until it started moving. In the middle, somewhere between a leg and a hand, what they realized was a head full of curls looks up at them. What struck the most fear into their hearts was that they recognized the face, no matter how dead and decaying it was, they knew it. 

“It’s-” Barry couldn’t stop himself, he had to say it to make sure he wasn’t the only one seeing it. “It’s Stan.”

At his name, Stan screams. Barry screams back involuntarily, and even more when Stanley’s head falls clean away from his body and rolls onto the floor. He curses to himself as he frantically jumps away from the head of his childhood friend rolling directly toward him and braces himself against a countertop only when he bumps into it in his panic.

The head doesn’t stop rolling until it hits one of the fallen boards in the center of the kitchen. Barry can barely see in his periphery Bill and Eddie flattened against the wall and door, all three of them too terrified to take their eyes off of it. 

Stanley’s eyes blink open to yellowed whites and hazed cataracts over his irises and Barry’s stomach rolls. 

“I’d still be alive if it wasn’t for you, Bill.” 

Barry’s breath hitches and he risks a glance to Bill, going right back to Stanley. 

Bill shakes his head, taking the tiniest step forward. “No,” his voice cracks. Barry’s brain can’t even process enough to think about what the hell that’s even supposed to mean.

Stan’s head twitches before any of them have the chance to say anything else, not that any of them could really think of anything to say. The head twitches again and turns toward him, and Barry does his damned best to not think about how the hell it can turn with no joints. 

Stan makes eye contact with him and Barry wants to gouge his own eyes out. 

“Richie what’s happening to me?”

Barry shakes his own head, making a blank unknowable noise that he assumes sounds like he doesn’t know either. It doesn’t matter anyway when Stan starts screaming and things start poking at his skin from the inside of his face, sharp and strong, piercing their way out of Stan’s cheeks and temples and- oh god out of one of his eye sockets. A horrible pus covers each extension as they exit Stanley’s head, bending at parts and- Christ. Jesus Christ they’re legs. There are now six giant spindly, pus-dripping, tan spider legs jutting out of Stanley’s head with- are those fucking fingers?? Those can’t be fucking fingers he’s going to vomit if he can get his body to ever move from it’s shocked frozen position. 

When the screaming stops Barry could almost cry, not knowing how much longer he would have been able to bear hearing Stan in that kind of pain. But the feeling is quickly overtaken by terror when the legs suddenly straighten to support Stan’s head completely, like he’d never needed the limbs in the fridge in the first place. The demeanor in Stan’s face changes immediately into the look of a manic hunter ready to pounce on its prey, a look none of them have ever seen on that face before. It eerily reminds them of the look Bowers always had when he’d spot them randomly in town. 

So when Spider-Stan - a name and comic book concept actual-Stan honestly would have loved- starts laughing at nothing then suddenly runs toward them with the horrifying speed of six legs, all three of them throw themselves in any direction they can to get away from it, including into walls. Stan is making this half-laughing half-chittering sound that makes their skin curdle, with suddenly too many teeth sharp as tacks, and- what are those small things coming out by his chin? Are those fucking pincers? Pincers fucking reaching out for them are met with frantic impulsive kicking, screaming and jumping away and onto any surface they can, not that anywhere is out of reach for this giant spider head thing. 

Barry is so taken aback he forgets he has a gun with him until after it lunges at Bill’s face, who dodges it and smacks it with his flashlight, punting it through the open window dividing the kitchen and another room. He belatedly watches Bill frantically scurry up to look through the window to where it went then runs to the doorway connecting the rooms and flashes his light quickly over every inch of it. Nothing. Nowhere to be found. 

Shit.

_Shit._

Barry has dealt with a lot but _this?!_ This is fucking insane. In any other _normal_ situation he wouldn’t have even stuttered to fight. To threaten a gun. To do anything other than scream. But this is too much. This is too fucking much. Oh fucking Christ what the everloving fuck. 

He stares into the empty dining room, to the broken window, and his head swims. The newfound silence of the room is much too loud, filled only by the sound of their panting. Well, his and Bill’s panting, Eddie’s sounds more like a wheeze. 

Eddie.

Barry turns immediately, thoughts filling with concern for Eddie, and once again his light makes it directly into his eyes. Eddie who winces away from the bright light, back still pressed firmly up against the corner he backed himself into. 

“Eddie,” Barry calls to him, taking quick steps forward as Bill scampers down from the counter he found himself on top of. “Hey, are you okay?”

It was a dumb question. He knew it, they both knew it. But what else was he supposed to ask?

“I’m-” Eddie starts like he still hasn’t let go of the breath he was holding when the fridge first opened, but he cuts himself off when something slimy drops into the air between where Eddie stayed against the wall and the few steps Barry had stopped short of him. It shines in the artificial light of Barry’s flashlight, moving up and down in a motion not at all related to wind. 

The slime shoots back up into the darkness above them, and Barry’s stomach drops. 

He doesn’t want to. He really doesn’t want to, but apparently Barry’s hand has a mind of its own and does it anyway. His wrist twists up, shining the flashlight into the rafters of the open ceiling, illuminating Stan’s head. What must have been spit was back tucked into Stan’s mouth, making his sharp grinning teeth shine. Barry distantly acknowledges the sudden lack of breathing (panting) around him, and says the only thing that comes to mind. 

“Oh, there he is.”

Stan’s head’s legs launch him toward Barry’s face at the same moment Barry finally reaches for his gun. But he isn’t fast enough. He’s barely got it out of his waistband and past his hip when he’s reunited with his friend in a much closer encounter than he wants. Stan’s momentum throws him backwards into Bill, crashing all three of them onto the floor. Both the gun and the flashlight fly out of either hand, and he has no time to even think of where they landed so he could reach out to them. Instead he’s met with fangs snapping toward him, an inch from his face, doing its damned best to break skin and pull ribbons of flesh away from his screaming cheeks. 

Barry’s not even processing anything he’s saying, he just knows that he’s screaming something to no one in particular, trying to keep the head just far enough away to keep it from ripping him apart. But he can feel each leg, each _toe_ digging into his skull and adjusting its grip for every push he gives at it, and whoever’s hands are braced on either side of Stan pulling at it. 

He feels someone get on top of him and for one horrifying moment he thinks Stan grew a body and was pinning him down until one good yank pulls the head back enough to see Bill’s head above him, pulling with all his might. At the sudden pull further than Stan’s head had been so far, Stan starts growling even louder, even more inhuman and terrifying, drooling whatever slime a detached head can make onto his face. The pincers in his cheek reach into the space between them, desperate for contact if his teeth can’t reach him to do the job. With each fell tug Barry can feel its toes digging deeper into his skull to keep its grip, squeezing his brain into releasing horrifying flashes of memories of blood and monsters in between the one snapping at his face right at the moment. 

“Bill get it off of me!”

He desperately wants to look around for his gun even though he doesn’t know if he can risk taking a hand off of it keeping it away from him. It doesn’t matter anyway, the drool quickly coating his face and into his eyes. He has to keep spitting in order to keep screaming, the taste of peeling acrylic paint overpowering his sense of taste, and the vision of a painting in Mr. Uris’s office coming to him when he has to squeeze his eyes shut from the slime. 

Bill is screaming something too, though he can’t be bothered to really hear it. The loud, high-pitched chittering taking up most of the space on his eardrums anyway. In his blindness and all of the movement coming from three inches away from him, one of his fingers comes in contact with something that’s thinner than its legs and not a normal part of a face. His first instinct is to recoil from it, but instead he grabs at it with three fingers, heel of his hand still firmly pushing away, and pulls as hard as he can. Spider-Stan screams in pain and it suddenly seems a little bit further away, but the thing is still in his hands. 

Purely on instinct, he lets go of the piece in his hand and reaches back toward the center of his face, finds another one and yanks it out as well. Stan screams again and digs his nails deeper into Barry’s brain, which he’s pretty sure will be stomped like grapes into wine pretty soon. New idea. He moves his hand back again and finds where the leg meets the head and grips the leg. He does the same on the other side as he feels Stan’s teeth millimeters from the skin of his arm, close enough to almost graze him. Then he pulls. He pulls as hard as he possibly can under the circumstances and pushes away at the same time. The legs, thicker and sturdier than the pincers on his cheeks, give him a run for his money. They don’t stretch, they don’t break away, but they do make Stan scream his piercing screech louder than before. He can feel the limbs attached to him turning into claws and briefly worries about how close one of them is to his temple as it digs in. 

And then it stops. The screaming, the tightening grip, the pressure launching itself closer to his face. The drooling doesn't stop, but instead is dropped onto him in uneven random spurts. The ringing in his ears subsides enough for Barry to hear grunts above him, and the upsettingly but gratefully familiar squelch of someone or something getting stabbed. Repeatedly. 

The weight of the head is lifted from his hands, and he can feel the claws releasing his head, feel them being gracelessly removed from where they broke skin, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been more relieved. He spits once, trying to get more of the drool out of his mouth, and wipes his eyes with the back of his hands while he’s at it. There’s a loud thump from across the room, and he opens his eyes just in time to see Stan’s head limping its way toward the doorway to the basement. 

He sees Bill jump to grab something off the floor just as Stan grins and laughs. Bill closes one eye and does his best to aim and shoot Barry’s forgotten gun at the head right when it rolls out and down to the basement. The bang of the two gunshots that follow reverberate through the small kitchen and everyone instinctively ducks. 

Bill is shocked at the force of the gun and its kickback, never having shot a gun before, and drops it in surprise. It’s a damn blessing it doesn’t go off again by accident. 

The room is still for a tense moment, until Barry deems the immediate threat over and drops his head back onto the ground. Beverly snaps out of it when he does and rushes over to where he lays limp, Ben dropping to a knee next to him. 

“Is everybody okay?” Beverly asks, knowing the answer is no but desperately begging for a yes. A heavy exhale is released from Ben as Beverly drops next to both of them and removes her blazer, using it to wipe up some of the stuff on Barry’s face. Barry lets her. 

“This is the second worst day of my life,” Barry is barely able to wheeze, voice hoarse. 

“Yeah?” Ben entertains him, scrubbing a hand over his own face. “What’s the first worst day?”

Barry, now able to properly see out of both eyes, mostly, stares up at the ceiling, Ben in his periphery raising an eyebrow at him. “Yesterday.”

Ben snorts and shakes his head, a bad joke easing the tension in his shoulders ever so slightly. He stands and offers a hand to Barry, pulling him up when he takes it. 

Barry is about to thank Beverly, in the middle of the word, actually, when Bill turns on Eddie. 

He hadn’t noticed, initially preoccupied, that Eddie was still backed against the wall where he’d left him. 

Eddie sees Bill coming toward him and he doesn’t even have the heart to defend himself. He knows he deserves what’s coming. He’d barely made it an inch off the wall when he saw Barry, okay, only slightly hurt, when Bill shoves him back into the wall. 

“He could have f-f-fucking died man!” Bill spits at him, fist curling into his shirt. “You know that right?”

Eddie can’t take his eyes off Barry until Bill is so close to his face he’s swimming in his vision. He doesn’t want to look him in the eyes. Can’t look him in the eyes. Won’t be able to handle the shame and disappointment and anger that would accompany it. But Bill forces him to, shaking the fistful of shirt until Eddie looks at him. 

And it’s worse than Eddie had thought it could be. 

The shame is there. The disappointment and anger too. But the desperation overpowers it all, and he feels the helplessness ebb between them both. He senses Bill’s self-control cracking as he starts listing the things stacked against them. 

“Georgie’s dead. The kid’s dead. Sta-stanley’s dead,” Bill cries, and Eddie sinks further into the wall. “Yo-you want R-richie too?” Neither of them see Barry or really acknowledge when he puts a hand on Bill’s shoulder. “You want Richie too?!”

Barry’s hand squeezes his shoulder, but he still doesn't get acknowledged. “I’m fine, Bill,” Barry tells them softly, trying to deescalate the situation. “I’m okay.”

Eddie still trembles as he speaks, palms still flat against the wall. When he jerkily shakes his head ‘no’ his whole body goes with it. “I don't want Richie too,” his voice sounds disconnected from him, shame evident in the tone he didn’t consciously choose himself. Bill yells at him again but with all the internal turmoil already going, Bill fighting against Barry pulling him back, Stan’s spider head still seared into his eyes, Eddie doesn’t hear it. “I don’t- I don’t,” he repeats blankly. When he’s finally able to see Bill again, burning less than a foot away from him, he’s thrown backwards in time, seeing Big Bill as he knew him. Tall and angry and carrying more baggage than any 13-year-old should have to. “Please don’t be mad, Bill,” he’s thirteen again, an age he maybe could have stood to forget forever. But it’s too late for that, because Barry was in trouble and he couldn’t bring himself to help him. “I was just scared.”

Bill stills, seeing his best friend shaking, trembling in his grip. Sees them at thirteen, fighting a battle they didn’t ask for, Eddie standing up to his mom for the first time in his life and being by Bill’s side no matter what. He looks down to where they’re connected. His fist shouldn’t be there. Shouldn’t be on him. They’re on the same side. Always have been. 

“Tha-” he doesn’t so much as stutter as he does run out of breath. “That’s what he w-w-wants, right?” He loosens his grip on Eddie’s shirt, but can’t bring himself to let go yet. He rubs a finger over the fabric which seems to ground him somewhat. He gives one more light tug to get Eddie’s attention again, not sure if he actually ever lost it, and lets go. “Don’t give it to him.”

He doesn’t wait for Eddie’s stuttered nod in response, letting Barry pull him away. They’re silent a moment when Barry spots his gun, bending down to retrieve it. 

“On the off chance you have to shoot it again,” he tells Bill but addresses the room. “Dominant hand here,” he grips the handle of the gun with his right hand, trigger finger at the ready. “Other hand here to stabilize,” he cups his left hand underneath his right hand and the handle. “Arms sturdy but loose, bent, especially your elbows for the kickback, both eyes open when you aim,” he raises his arms and lifts his shoulders, aiming across the kitchen to the doorway of the dining room Spider-Stan initially disappeared into. “Then squeeze lightly on the trigger. You don’t have to press hard, do your best not to tense up, or the kickback will get you. Also the noise.” Barry holds his position for a moment, flashing back to when he trained the Chechens. Another memory he doesn’t want to think about. He straightens back up, adjusting his posture to one more casual, and brings the gun down without shooting. Shaking the memory of Noho Hank in the desert with his stupid hat out of his head, he pushes the gun back into his waistband. “Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

Bill claps him lightly on the shoulder, stunned into silence for a moment. “Thanks Barry.”

The room is filled with quiet shuffling, Beverly moving over to check on Eddie, Eddie waving her off, until Bill finds his flashlight on the ground and picks it up. The light swings around the room, grabbing the attention of all of the Losers. They turn to him, their leader, and Bill takes a deep breath, knowing he doesn’t need to say anything, then turns toward the stairs to the basement Spider-Stan rolled down. 

The stairs creak with every step, whining against the weight they haven’t supported in probably years. Their steps are heavy, tired already, but mostly dreading the next step. Literally and figuratively.

Ben makes it past the landing and his breath catches. The smell had gotten worse with every step further into the basement, more of sewage now than fear, but still a healthy mix of the two. But when his eyes catch on the well, the opening, the gateway between It’s world and theirs, his heart slams against his chest before he even has a chance to organize the memories that associate with the sewers. 

“A lot of memories, huh?” he feels he has to stay to flatten the nausea, and letting the rest of the group know they’re all feeling it too. He taps nervously against the banister. “All bad.”

None of them have an objection to that, so they continue closer, closer, closer still to the well until they surround it. The complete darkness in the well does nothing to ease their nerves, a flashlight revealing nothing but more darkness further than it could reach. The rope that they used last time was still there, aged and slightly slimy with moss. The Losers Club glances once more around at each other before Bill swings a leg over first, beginning their descent. 

~~

Monroe Fuches has been having a weird day. 

He’d booked a flight to Maine at four a.m., threw some shit into a bag and got on a plane. That was all fine. 

But as soon as he landed he hadn’t felt like he made any conscious decisions. He couldn't even remember any of the decisions he had made. He found himself in a car, then he found himself in some empty clearing, then in front of the Derry Townhouse. 

Then, somehow, for some reason his greatest imagination couldn’t supply to him, he found himself in the sewers of some town he didn’t even know the name of with no recollection of how he got there. Or the bag in his hand. 

It’s a woman’s purse, gripped in his right hand, long pink strap bunched in his fist. It’s a nice bag, he guesses, but it’s definitely not his.

Then his nostrils join him back into the world of the living conscious and he gags. These tunnels he’s in have a stench he can’t even begin to think of trying to decipher without gagging again, but when he looks down to see that the puddle he’s standing in is actually shin deep and dark brown with trash slowly floating between his legs and as far as he could see, he gags again anyway. 

He digs through the contents of whoever’s bag this is for anything that could be at all useful for blocking out the stench, suddenly wishing he wasn’t conscious of what he was doing or where he was again. There’s nothing helpful in this bag whatsoever save for a travel pack of tissues towards the bottom that he could use to plug his nose up. He yanks them out of the depths bag then drops the purse into the shin deep sewage he’s standing in then looks both ways down the tunnel. Going straight seems like there could be a fork in directions, so he opts for continuing that way. 

He doesn’t know or care who’s purse that is but they’re not getting it back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of a filler here, sorry. I really wanted to try and get inside their minds and up the horror a little bit, even though I didn't get to the whole Ben and the mirror part (it is, fundamentally, Barry's story). I'd always thought of Pennywise's horror as a more full five senses experience and I don't know why, so this happened.  
> Anyway.


End file.
